Blue Sundaze at the King's College Chapel, 3/27/08

Here are some of the photos I took at last week's Blue Sundaze show. I meant to send these to my friend Rose, and this is probably the easiest way to do it. Only three photos, though I took well over a dozen, for reasons I will explain shortly.
The band warming up. John (bass), Rose (guitar), Derrick (drums). Not visible, off to the right, is Ray (guitar.) (Everybody does vocals.)

This photo was taken without a flash using the self-timer and a mini-tripod to minimize camera motion. Even under those conditions, you can still see that the light favored Rose over the other members of the band, which resulted in no complaints at all. Still, it made it almost impossible to get decent photos of anyone but Rose. And due to the amount of time the shutter stayed open, there's motion blur on faces and hands.

For the rest of the night I decided to use a trick I had worked out during birthday parties and the Englebert Humperdinck show last year: set the camera to "Sports" mode and squeeze off a series of short-exposure, no-flash, high sensitivity shots. This is the ideal way to capture the act of blowing out the candles on a cake, and is also great for indoor concerts where you want to get something that resembles the actual lighting condition.

So for the rest of the night I periodically squeezed off bursts of three shots at a time. (I should really increase the number of shots per squeeze.) Even so, some pictures showed motion blur, and others captured images that weren't ideally set up. But with over a dozen images to choose from , I was able to pick out two that I thought were pretty nice. (These may actually be from the same group of images, two shots from a series of three.) Red came out very well in these shots. Rose's shirt is matched by the muppet Animal's fur. Nice guitar pose! Derrick is hiding his face behind a cymbal.
Another, almost identical image. Derrick is still hiding.

Unless I neglected to mention something in my blog, this marked the first time I had seen Blue Sundaze perform since December 2005. I hope it doesn't take that long to see them again!