Acoustic Night at the PCA

EXIF Data



















EXIF Data













EXIF Data













EXIF Data













EXIF Data

The photo set above is from the Acoustic Night at the Parish Center for the Arts, which is a old church in Westford (my home town) that hosts concerts and events. This acoustic night was held on January 11th over winter break. Because I am an avid photographer who is always willing to expand his photographic skills, I attend most PCA events and just start taking pictures of pretty much everything. In my camera bag that night was my camera body, Digital Rebel XTi, my Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 lens and my Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. I also brought something new to the concert, my Speedlite 430EX, which is an external flash that attaches to the camera. Since I just got it for Christmas, I had not had many chances to shoot with it, and I found the acoustic night to be the perfect opportunity. I took around two hundred photos that night, but I only picked five to post to this blog, four of which have been post-processed in Adobe Lightroom.

The first photo is straight from the camera and has not been processed. The first photo is of my neighbor during his set, and if I remember correctly he was covering “Creep” by Radiohead. That was a real crowd pleaser, everybody starting singing along. The next photo down is starting to explore my more artistic, both in my composition and the way I processed it in Lightroom. The subject was playing the piano part of “Fix You”, a song by Coldplay. It was a duet, but the photos I took of the singer weren’t that great. I shot the photo from a low angle with an exposure of one second and shooting the flash, and then in Lightroom I played with the contrast and vibrancy to make the subject jump out of the photo a little more. The next three photos were me exploring my more creative and artistic side. The third photo probably looks a little weird to you, like the subjects arm is managing to be in two places at one. That was because set the camera to a longer exposure, shot the flash and zoomed in and out at the same time! That decision, along with some contrast adjustment, produced what I thought was an interesting photo.

The last two show my love of high contrast black and white photos. Both photos were shot with the camera touching the stage, the first with my Sigma lens and the second with the Canon lens. When I took the photos, I thought they looked pretty good, but I knew I could do more with them to make the subjects really stand out against all the cables and mike stands. So I brought them into Lightroom and started to adjust the contrast, exposure, brightness, and black levels until I was satisfied with the end result. Out of the five pictures I posted, the last one is my favorite. I like how the white of his shoes offsets the black of the rest of the photo and how one’s eyes are drawn to them. Now I open it up to the readers, what do you think of my photos? Be honest, but be constructive at the same time, tell me what I did wrong and what I can do to improve, both in composition and processing. Anyone is free to comment and even share some samples of their own work!