Kevin's Weblog

I’ve decided to suspend my attempts to switch to Everyman for a couple weeks. It’s just been too difficult to try to sustain the schedule while we’re in LA. My core sleep has been somewhat regular, but my naps have been all over the place. I’m finding it hard to actually fill the hours being away from home and my usual amusements. Most importantly, I’ve had to drive 2-3 hours most days we’ve been here, and I feel like I’ve been in very questionable condition to be on the road so much.

Due to all these factors, I’m going to go back to monophasic (or maybe biphasic) for a while. We’ll be in LA for another week, and then a couple days after we get back, we’re going on a camping trip. After that, I think I’ll give things another go.

Last weekend when Kenn and Sarai were in town, we went to a performance by East Meets West. Because we arrived just as the intermission started, I didn’t get to see as much as I might have liked, but what I did see was pretty interesting.

Here’s a couple photos from the evening:

There’s more posted on Flickr.

I don’t have much experience with concert photography, so this was an interesting learning experience to try to figure out how to capture the atmosphere. I quickly discovered than none of the programmed modes did a good job. I figured that I needed longer exposures to pick up the colored lights in the smoke, so I started playing around in shutter-priority mode. The most successful settings seemed to be about a 1/15 or 1/20 sec exposure to get the colors plus flash to freeze the performers. The other big thing I learned is that I need to spend some time familiarizing myself with all the controls on my camera until I know them by feel and can accurately adjust everything in the dark.