Above & Beyond

[joshua0]

(...and more...)

Hi, LiveJournal! I went to see a show recently, and I took some photos. By the way, if you liked Above & Beyond's previous albums (Sirens of the Sea and Tri-State), you should buy their new one (Group Therapy). It's pretty good -- a lot like the previous two, but more of it.

Comments

[gregh1983]

Wow, fantastic colors in all of those there! What kind of equipment were you using to get such clear exposures in the dark?

[chrisamaphone]

agree! i love the colors!

[joshua0]

These were all shot with my Sony NEX-C3, with the kit 18-55mm lens (built-in image stabilization). It is a remarkable piece of equipment; it is small enough that it fits in my pocket ('sort of'; well, it takes up... all of my pocket...), but still powerful enough to get nice images out. I feel as though I cheated on some of them (see my response to hvincent's comment, which I will type in a moment...), but I guess all is fair in love and photography...

[gregh1983]

Wow, that's a kit lens? I'm impressed! My kit 18-55 only goes down to f/4.0 at the 18 end, so it's already pretty useless in a classroom, much less a concert hall. That's great that you can carry such little equipment around and know how to get results with it.

[joshua0]

Yes, this is one of two kit lenses for this camera. (The other is a 16mm; I have both, and now that I have the zoom, I almost never use the pancake lens.) Note that 18-55 on this is 35mm equivalent to 27-83mm, because of this mount's crop factor. I believe on the 18 end, this goes down to f/3.5 (plus another stop or so worth of stability from image stabilization); on the 55 end, I think I'm down to f/5.6. Overall, it is decent glass (especially for a kit lens!), but when shooting concert photos, I think one always wants "just a little more zoom" or "just another half a stop" to get the image one wants...

I keep considering getting more glass, but the problem is that once you buy more glass, you start wanting a lens for every occasion, and that seems to be a very fast path to a money sinkhole... so until I strike it terribly huge, I suspect I will be still be content with what I have here.

[gregh1983]

one always wants "just a little more zoom" or "just another half a stop"

Argh, yes, this is always happening to me. I currently have my kit 18-to-55 lens plus a 70-to-300 telephoto, which strikes me as an almost-complete lens solution. That inoffensive gap between 55 and 70 mm is way more annoying than it looks: I'm always in classrooms and things where 55 mm at f/5.6 is a bit too closed down, but 70 mm at f/4 is too telephoto. Alan solved that problem with a 50-mm f/2 prime, I think. I don't know about the price of such a lens, but it sounds like a good idea to fill the gap.

I agree that I'd also find a 16 mm pretty useless given the kit lens. The f-stop's not usually a problem for me at the wide end since I don't tend to like taking pictures wider than about 25 mm on the digital scale.

[hvincent.livejournal.com]

holy shit new above & beyond album why didn't i know this

also it appears that you are enjoying a camera

yes good

[chrisamaphone]

haha, this made me grin.

[joshua0]

BTW you might like the album, specifically. I'm not sure if I have your musical tastes pinned down or not, but there is a bunch of stuff on there that is stylistically similar to some of the music that I associate with you. If you grab it, let me know whether I got it dialed in right or not.

[chrisamaphone]

hmm, so far what i am tasting seems like generic trance, but the bassier bits are indeed things i could enjoy dancing to. the slow interludes annoy me though; i have a thing against synth strings.

[joshua0]

Yeah, I didn't know either!

Yes, I am enjoying the camera, though as I noted above, I sort of feel as though I cheated with some of these. The originals did not look nearly as good as when I was done with them in Lightroom. (I am very glad I shot RAWs.) I sort of feel like these controls:



should actually be labeled as:



Some of the images I did 'real work' on (I'll upload the originals at some point) to get better results out of; but really, Lightroom is truly amazing...

[hvincent.livejournal.com]

honestly, i don't consider that sort of dial-twiddling as cheating; it is just making slightly easier something that would otherwise have been a huge pain in the ass to do, but you still have to make a lot of decisions about what you are doing.

[jgrafton]

TIL Oceanlab = Above and Beyond + 1