music

Little Fans

I photographed the 15th Annual Oak Bluffs School Talent Show tonight (well, the second half, at least). It started with a literal bang, as six kids on six drum sets joined their music teacher (on guitar) and friend (on bass) for a wicked awesome run-through of Smoke on the Water, Fire, and Wipeout. I didn’t have a tripod (or knowledge that it was about to happen), or I would have recorded video. So good!

This was my favorite non-performance moment, though. The OB School, like all of the other town schools here, is K-8; there’s no separate middle school. And the little girl was so excited about watching an Eighth Grader (gasp!) perform.

 

Winter Strings Concert

Usually, when we cover the elementary school orchestra recital (which is always on deadline night), we rush off to the performance for a quick photo and then rush back to the newsroom to get that photo on the front page of the Friday paper. But this time, the editors decided not to overnight the story (hooray for web sites!), and so I stayed for the whole show to create a multimedia gallery and short article.

It was adorable- particularly the youngest group plinking their way through “Hot Cross Buns” (nobody started at the same time, so it was kind of like a round!). The nice thing about these kind of recitals, when all the levels perform on the same night, is that you can see (and hear) the progress of the musicians. It’s a very good testament to the entire strings program here.

The Sound of Music

I love my summer job, but I think the men of the Vineyard Sound might have an even better deal that I do (the Cape Cod Leaguers probably have the best job, to be fair).

The Vineyard Sound is an all-male a cappella group made up of college guys from around the Northeast. They come out here in early June and then…basically spend the whole summer performing in concert around the Island. That’s it. That’s their summer job. I mean, wow.

I actually went to this shoot as a backup measure- it hadn’t been assigned specifically but the Gazette usually does a huge feature on the Sound each year, and I wanted to make sure we had photos from their big Midsummer Concert, which was held at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs (same place where my cousin’s graduation was). (I also wanted to hear them sing, because I love a cappella music).

I’d really like to do a multimedia piece on the group eventually (I suspect it would be very similar to the Hickman band piece I already did, but I don’t care). I’m not sure that I’m the, um, right gender to get the necessary access and do the piece justice, though. But maybe I could pull it off. You never know.

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Bestival

After Streetball I trucked over to the other side of town to the Featherstone Center for the Arts to do a piece on a music festival being held that day. The Featherstone campus is beautiful- tall oaks shading everything and little nature paths all over the place. Of course, once I got there all I wanted to do was pass out under the trees after five hours of in-the-sun basketball shooting, but photos come first.

(The festival was technically called the Best Festival, but I liked merging the words much better).

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Oh hi, flash! Thanks for helping out- you’re pretty great sometimes!

Character Profile: Re-Edit

We got to re-edit our character profiles in FinalCut, which gave me a chance to go back and clean up all of my terrible audio from the first go-around. It’s still far from perfect, but wayyy better than before. I had two more shoots to incorporate into the profile, one of which was an all-day affair (see previous post), which made for an interesting re-edit since I was trying to keep the basic narrative the same. Here’s hoping it worked okay.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDLi2j0gVGM]

I'm with the Band: Greater STL Marching Festival, part two

I should be working on my thesis prospectus right now, but there’s nothing like a paper to make you decide to catch up on blogging.

As the previous post said, I spent yesterday at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis following my Character Profile subjects (all 120+ of them) through the paces of performing at a band festival. Theoretically the photos I took would be incorporated into my Picture Story multimedia piece, but that’s going to need some serious re-editing in order to fit in the additional element of festival competitions. We’ll see if I have time to pull that off (again, that thesis prospectus…). In the meantime, here’s a visual summary of (almost) everything that happened yesterday.

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20091024_0364_webSilhouettes. I couldn’t help it.

20091024_0258_edit_webFor better or worse, I don’t usually take photos like this. Let me know if you think it worked.

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20091024_0145_webHolding their certificate of recognition- but no trophy.

20091024_0157_webOne of the winning bands got to the parking lot at the same I did. I have to figure out which one! Argh.

Dispatch from the Greater St. Louis Marching Band Festival

I haven’t had a chance to do more than a rough edit of my pictures from yesterday, when I went with the Hickman band to a marching festival in STL (in which the band placed a quarter-point out of trophy-level contention). Here’s one that, um, stood out a little from the others. I think there are at least three light sources competing for attention in this photo. 20091024_0396_edit_web

Picture Story: Character Profile first draft

I can’t embed Soundslides files in WordPress (gah), but here is the link to my draft of the Character Profile. The audio is pretty wretched (I was trying to make the recording levels of five different recording situations actually work together…they didn’t), but please please watch and tell me what you think! I get to rework it into a FinalCut show in the next month, so any and all feedback would be much appreciated.

The Soundslides file is here (it’ll open in a new window).

Also, a couple of images that didn’t really fit into the final audio narrative:

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Strawberry shortcake, gooseberry pie: The Hickman Marching Band

These are some stills from the Character Profile I’m working on for Picture Story. My “character” is the Hickman High School marching band (I wanted to follow a drum major around, but Rita suggested just going with the whole group. Much better!), which is made up of some 120 people, including the color guard, and which currently has a better record in competition than the actual football team does.

My high school didn’t have a marching band, so most of what I already knew about band kids came from my best friend, who was a trumpet/tuba player all through high school–in Florida, where football and band are at a tier just below Friday Night Lights level. I’ve been up at Hickman five times in the past week, and can safely say that these musicians are hardcore. They’ve been simultaneously prepping for their Homecoming game (last night) and a marching festival, where they’ll be competing with other Missouri bands. Their field practices are at 6:30 in the morning, they have additional practices during actual band class and for two hours in the evening during a game week, they have to know their routines and their music cold, and on top of that, there’s the whole schoolwork thing. As one of the drum majors told me, it’s a lifestyle. I’m impressed.

20091007_0050_edit_webWarming up during morning field practice.

20091007_0082_editIt’s cold.

20091011_0383_webWoodwinds during indoor practice

20091009_0331_webFourth quarter of the Homecoming game (Hickman won).

20091009_0349_webI have yet to hunt down everybody’s name…but the toddler is one of the band director’s daughters. Awww.

20091009_0246_webGoing out for the halftime show during Homecoming.

20091011_0426_webWaiting for the buses to the band festival to load. Scant rest for the weary.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?

We interrupt this slate of summer-happenings posts for yet another concert post. I actually don’t go to many concerts; I don’t think I’ve been to more than ten in my life. But tonight Chuck Berry, aka the King of Rock and Roll, the guy whose sound basically created the sound of the early Beatles, (especially) the early and middling Stones, and the Beach Boys (“Sweet Little Sixteen”/”Surfin’ USA”), among others, played a free concert in Columbia as part of the Summerfest series sponsored by the Blue Note.

I had heard that previous Summerfest concerts didn’t allow large cameras in to the blocked-off street area, so I left my Canon at home before heading down to Ninth St. I then realized this was a very stupid move, as there was in fact no restriction at all on cameras, and I should have been practicing the ‘better to ask forgiveness than permission’ principle of photo-j. Fortunately, I got to the venue three hours before Mr. Berry came on stage (thinking he would play one, not three hours after the gates opened), so I had plenty of time to zip back home and get my gear. This, by contrast, was a very good move. I would have been so frustrated to not have any of my own images of the show. But now I do!

And, wow, what a show. I mean, Chuck Berry is going to be 83 years old in October, and here he was playing guitar for a 45-minute outdoor set, singing his heart out, and duck walking during “Johnny B. Goode.” If I’m in half that shape when I’m 83, I’ll consider myself pretty lucky. He wasn’t perfect–some chords were off, he sang in odd keys for some songs, blah blah etc etc–but there’s something refreshing about the lack of polish. Rock isn’t supposed to be polished. I saw the Stones play a few years ago in Houston, and while it was great to see them live, the concert was part of an arena tour, more of a piece of choreography than anything else.

On a similar note, the show tonight was, as mentioned, free. There’s something wonderful, I think, about watching a performer sing and play purely for love of the game. The something wonderful becomes all the more “whoa”-inspiring when you stop to consider that the love of the game has been such a time-spanning affair. The affair looks like it’s going to continue for even longer–Berry’s son Charles Jr. plays guitar in the backup band. Aww.

The problem with bringing a camera to a concert, however, is that I’m just too darn short, and I have to Hail Mary all the time while trying to get decent images. It’s hard to Hail Mary with a telephoto lens, though, so I had to wait until the bodies in front of me kindofsortof moved out of the way–for a hair of a second–so I could get a frame in. BUT…all of the masses in front also provided instant negative space to work with, which ended up working better than I thought it would. Exhibit A:

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There are a few more that follow- again, here I am stuck in one spot at the concert and unable to really vary the images (I think this point is much more clear if you look at the previous concert post and compare it to this one). Or is this just a by-product of concert photography? Either way, it’d probably be good to bring my flash next time I’m at a show (whenever that will be) and try to play around with that, for something new and exciting.

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