Yesterday I woke up early and drove (in the April Fool’s slushstorm) up to Front Street Coffeehouse in Salem, MA to hang a new photo show. 16 of my rock and dance photos are on display there for the month of April, so if you’re on the North Shore, go check it out.
Coming up in May and June, another show at Za Restaurant in Arlington. Stay tuned for details about an opening celebration.
Photos hanging in Front Street Coffeehouse in Salem, MA
Truly, Paul Janovitz (http://www.pauljanovitz.com/) deserves credit for making me a RAW convert. Paul is a Boston area photographer and musician and we met when I was shooting Tony Savarino playing at Church of Boston. He’s been doing this stuff longer than I have, so I spent some time picking his brain about photo business and technical issues and he was nice enough to give me advice. The fact that I didn’t (at the time) shoot in RAW came up and he strongly suggested I try it out. I’m sure most of you that have heard of RAW have heard the stories about how much better it is. I had always been skeptical, but now I’m a believer.
About two months after my conversation with Paul I was shooting The Red Elvises (Russian surf rock, if you can imagine such a thing) at TT The Bear’s in Cambridge and accidentally set my camera for the mode where it shoots in both RAW and JPG simultaneously. This gave me the perfect opportunity to look into the supposed merits of RAW. The light at TT’s that night (as is often the case at shows) was downright awful. There wasn’t much of it and what there was was mostly red. Usually in these situations I fall back on black and white, because there’s only so much help you can give to an image that is too red. Well, it turns out you can do a lot more if you start from RAW.
Here are 3 images of Elena Shemankova, the keyboard player for the Elvises. The first image is straight from the camera. It really gives you an idea of what the lighting conditions were that night. Image #2 is my best effort to do color correction starting from the JPG version of the image. Image #3 is my final image after I color corrected starting with the RAW version of the image. The improvement is striking.
Original shot, right out of the camera
Color corrected JPG version
Final color corrected JPG working from RAW
As you can see, there’s just no comparison. There is so much more information stored in the RAW file that gets thrown away when the camera converts to JPG. It’s all this extra data that allows a wider range of color correction and exposure improvements. Exposure correction is the number one reason I’ve seen people recommend RAW. I don’t have any examples on hand, but it is definitely the case that there’s a wider dynamic range captured in the pure sensor data. Areas of an image that would be all white or all black (and stay that way no matter what you did) in a JPG capture can often yield more data if you’re working from a RAW sensor dump.
Now, there are two reasons that I had avoided messing with RAW for a while, and I think both would be legitimate reasons to have second thoughts about it.
First, the images are larger than their JPG conversions. The NEF files that come out of my 12 megapixel Nikon D700 are about 14.3 Megs, while the JPGs are about 4. Disk space is pretty cheap these days, but that’s still a big difference, especially when it comes to how many images you can get on a memory card.
Second, it adds a step to the workflow, and that’s a little annoying. RAW file formats are all proprietary and vary from camera to camera, even for the same makers. Lightroom 1 (yes, I’m behind the times) won’t natively read the NEF format that comes out of a D700, so I first put all the NEF files on disk, use Adobe’s free DNG converter to convert them all to the Adobe Digital Negative format (basically a RAW format that all Adobe products can handle), and then import them to lightroom. It’s not so bad, but it takes a little more work and a little more organization. Only you can decide if the improved results are worth the extra effort. If you’re shooting in reasonable lighting conditions or are just doing quick shots that you don’t want to spend a lot of time messing around with, RAW may not pay off. But if you’re pushing the limits of what your camera wants to do, I think the choice is pretty clear. For all intents and purposes I’m pretty much trying to take pictures in the dark when I go shoot shows, so shooting in RAW is a no brainer.
Thanks Paul!
Andy Milas of Esthema (www.esthema.com), a Boston area world music group, saw my photos up at Za and contacted me to have me do some work for them. I ended up shooting their recent show at Ryles in Inman Square, Cambridge on June 30th. The group consists of 5 people: bass guitar, guitar, drums, violin and a fifth player who switches off between bouzouki & oud (both stringed instruments).
Esthema performs regularly in the Boston area and if you like instrumental music with a middle eastern feel, I recommend that you check them out. You can listen to some of their tracks at their website.
Andy Milas of Esthema
Tery Lemanis of Esthema
For more photos, check out the Esthema gallery here.
I hadn’t shot a show at Ryles before. The room is set up with a lot of small tables coming right up to the stage. If you like to sit and eat while you watch a band, this could be a place for you. The stage is very shallow, which allowed me to be closer to the drummer than usual (they’re frequently well back from the rest of the band) and it was a natural space between the stage and tables that let me move around as needed, but the backgrounds were a little busy for my taste. The blue light from the window neon lights added a neat effect in some shots though.
Friday night I went out to the Cantab Downstairs to catch Father Octopus and a few other bands. I’ve seen F.O. a few times but was unfamiliar with the rest of the program. The lineup was Radio Control, Bookkeeper, Father Octopus and Vent. All of these bands are somewhat hard to describe but worth a listen. I like Father Octopus quite a bit. Vent involves a lot of distored bass guitar and some strange lyrics. Radio Control is a guitar/drum duo who reminds one slightly of the white stripes but has bit of a softer sound and feel to them. Bookkeeper is fairly standard rock, but was a good time. Check their music out for yourself at:
http://weareradiocontrol.com/
http://www.myspace.com/bookkeeperrocks
http://fatheroctopus.com
http://ventsucks.com
Photos:
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For the first time ever, my photography is on display in public! For the months of June and July you can find 13 of my prints at Za Restaurant in Arlington, MA. It’s awesome and a little surreal to see your own photos, printed large, framed and on a wall in a public space.
For my next trick: finding something to do with 13 large framed photos when August rolls around and the next artist takes his or her place on the walls at Za. For now, I’m just going to enjoy my first art show.
angles by Stephen Gray
Stephen Gray, xgray on Flickr, has totally altered the way I think about photography. His work forces me to see the world around me differently, and completely changed the way I think about composition. Shadows and negative space also figure prominently in his work, and it is his photos with brilliant sunlight and deep shadows cutting across the frame that most capture my imagination. xgray is also a master of the found scene and taking simple, mundane objects and making the viewer look at them in a different way. This is also the first photographer whose work I have seen and then consciously tried to emulate. I’m sure that if I can learn to see the world like he does, which is very much how the camera sees it, I will be a better photographer.
I sent him a few questions and his answers are below, along with a handful of my favorite images he’s produced.
You can see more shots that I feel best represent what I find fascinating about Stephen Gray’s work in a Flickr gallery I created here and you can find my (so far limited) experimentation with doing work like this here.
A friend recently asked me for some advice on a DSLR purchase, ideally for under $1000. I put my thoughts together and this (slightly edited) is what I came up with. Since I took the time to write it out, I figured I might as well post it here in case anyone else is interested. There are plenty of other reviews of entry level DSLRs out there, and I recommend you do some more research before you take my word for it. I haven’t actually used any of the cameras that I discuss here (aside from my old D40).
Saturday night I went out to The Magic Room in Brighton, MA to see the premiere of Black Fortress of Opium’s new video and photograph the set that they played. The Magic room turns out to be kind of hard to find. It’s pretty much just a room in a large building full of practice spaces and the like. A nice spot for a show though. The opening band was Jaggery and had a bit of a unique lineup. Fronted by a keyboardist/vocalist and filled out by a drummer, electric viola and electric harp and backing vocals. It also turns out that the keyboard player and lead singer is a friend of a friend from college, though I didn’t know this until after the fact.
I feel I got some excellent photos of this show.
