David Emery OnlineHow to be a gig photographer pt.2
Time for part 2 of ‘How to be gig photographer’ – part 1 can be found here.
In part 1 I talked about the kit – camera, lenses and flashes – and a little bit about technique, and now I’m going to finish up by talking about post-processing which might be more important then you think; while you can’t process a bad photo into a good one, you can certainly make a good one even better.
But first there’s a little bit of gear to talk about that I left out of the last instalment – memory cards. Like batteries, you can never have too many memory cards – they’re getting cheaper all the time so there’s no excuse not to have plenty. At the moment, 4GB cards are the sweet spot (for compact flash cards, at least); obviously you want the largest size card you can get, so you don’t have to keep changing them, but 8GB cards are still a bit overpriced (no doubt if you’re reading this in 6 months they’ll be the ones to go for). I carry 3 4GB cards around with me when I’m photographing a gig – each card gets me about 400 shots...
Read more ➔How to be a gig photographer
I’ve had a couple of people recently ask me what gear I use for photographing gigs and how I go about it, so I thought that I’d write it all up here in a 2 part mini-series. Now, I’m not going to pretend I really know what I’m doing by any stretch, but hopefully some of this will give you a pointer in the right direction.
In this post I’m going to talk about the important bit – taking the photographs – and hence what I use to do it.
Unsurprisingly enough, I use a Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera, specifically the Canon 4ooD. The reasons for using a DSLR over a normal compact camera are legion, but for gig photography the key reason is the imaging sensor: the sensor (basically the digital equivalent of film – it’s the thing that actually captures the image) in a DSLR is far larger than that in a compact, and having a larger sensor means that you get less noise (or grain) in your photos.
Noise is probably...
Read more ➔New York I Love You
The classic – and I really mean classic – LCD Soundsystem song as sung by Kermit. Brilliant twist at the end as well, for any LCD/DFA fans.
Visit ➔Lily Allen Shows Off Newish Song, EMI Shows Off Newish YouTube Strategy
Usually when a new track makes its way to the Web, YouTube fills up with unauthorized rips of the track, featuring visuals that are promo pics (sometimes stitched together with your Windows Media Maker wipes, often static) and maybe the lyrics on the side. They’re also embeddable, so people (cough cough) can stick them on their blogs, or what-have-you. Parlophone decided to beat the YouTubers at their own game, though, creating an embeddable video that not only streams the song, it gives details on how to preorder the album.
You know what, this actually is a pretty good idea. I’ve been championing for a while the idea of having an easily embedable song player – I’m looking at you, Last.fm and Hype Machine – and this is a pretty good pass at it using the already existing YouTube architecture. Would be nice if the audio was nicer quality though.
What makes this doubly interesting is that EMI are almost certainly a YouTube partner, so will be receiving ad revenue from these YouTube plays…
Visit ➔Last.fm Best Of 2008
Really nicely done – love the design, especially the font choices and the little graphs (some of which are powered by the Google Chart API, which I always forget about). However, the content isn’t exactly interesting – the singles chart particularly; I guess that what’s popular in this context isn’t actually a metric that contains much insight.
Visit ➔Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage: Textpattern 4.0.7!
We are happy to announce that Textpattern 4.0.7 is finally ready for public consumption.
During long and – sometimes – laborious months since the last release in February, we added new features and enhanced existing capabilities, but nevertheless we expect upgrades from any previous version to be seamless and smooth.
Lots of good new features here, especially the tag related ones which make Textpattern even more flexible – well worth an upgrade.
Visit ➔
Making Iron Man
Beautiful set of behind the scenes photos from the set of Iron Man, taken by Jeff Bridges (who played the villain in said film).
Visit ➔TVotR
Last Wednesday I tootled down to Shepherds Bush Empire to see the wonderful TV On The Radio, supported by the intriguing The Big Pink.
I’m quite a fan of The Big Pink’s ‘Too Young To Love’ – which can be heard on their MySpace – so it was good to check them out again after seeing them at Concrete and Glass last month. I think I may prefer them slightly on record then live, but that’s not to say they’re not worth a watch – it comes across as a quite post-modern mix of shoegaze and electro, with maybe a hit of new rave for good measure. Showgaze is officially back in now, so they may well go far.
TV On The Radio were – of course – brilliant, although slightly encumbered by the dodgy sound that is ever present at the Empire; stand near the front and you’re fine, but anything past about half-way back and it turns into a muddy mess. Nevertheless TVotR were a tight ball of thunderous energy, playing a varied set that encompassed much of their illustrious back catalogue. Exceptional.
