Stark Raving Band - Part 1

[Geoff]

Well not quite raving, but fantastic none the less. Bel and myself had the pleasure of seeing Gary and his band perform at Kings Cross tonight, here's a few. Comment as always welcomed:

[Alpha_7]

Last one is my favourite out of this set Geoff, great use of DOF perhaps being greed a little more would of got the whole guitar in focus but its my pick of the bunch.

I like the idea of the piano shot but to be honest its too bust and for me takes a central focus.

I think the other two could be improved it a little cloning or cropping to lessen the distractions and focus the view more on the muscians.

[gstark]

Not quite "my band".

Olivia, the singer, is a young lady whom I've been mentoring over the last few months. She's been wanting to start singing in front of people for a while, but didn't know how to get into it.

As many would know, I do a lot of jamming around the place, and I originally met Olivia at the Empire's Wednesday blues jam. I've workshopped with her on occassional weekends, and helped her find keys, prepare arrangements, and so forth. A couple of weeks ago she was offered a gig at Bar Me at Kings Cross and asked if I would be interested in sitting in on bass, and whom else could I suggest as players.

Both of my first choices were avaiable and willing, and there we were. I spent a few hours with Olivia on the Saturday, a couple more with guitarist Dave Shaw and Olivia on Sunday, but the only time pianist Carolyn Packer could join us was at about 5, on the afternoon prior to the gig.

So, we performed with not even 90 minutes rehearsal time as the full combo, and at a couple of points during the evening, that showed. But that's life, and that's live music. We had a ball, and from all reports, the audience enjoyed what we were doing too.

Nice images, Geoff.

The last one has great use of DoF and nicely shows Dave's old Epiphone.

The first image is very unusual. It seems, to me, to be a focussing error, in that the point of focus is the mike stand. That has cause both Carolyn and myself to be thrown OOF, which one might ordinarly be considered to be an error, and one might even be inclined to ditch this one.

But ...

In this case, you have the two of us, both OOF, balancing the sharply focussed mike stand, and for some reason, that works.

[Geoff]

Thanks for your comments Craig, as always it's these which help us improve. It was fairly squishy where I was trying to move around to get these angles and with the 50mm 1.4 there's not a huge amount of scope. I'm looking forward to my next attempt

[PiroStitch]

Last one does it for me too Geoff.

I think if you cropped the left side of the third pic a bit more, it would be great and maybe burn the borders a bit in Pshop to give the focus a bit more on the hands and the piano keys.

Just read the exifs and can understand the damn hard light conditions you would have been in.

[ozimax]

I'll have to agree here, the last image is an absolute corker, I think poster material even. It drew me in from the first glance. Max.