For Valentines Day Leah bought us two tickets to go and see Josh Ritter. He played at the Knox United Church (in Calgary), which was an incredible venue. You really can’t ask for better acoustics than a huge cathedral-style church.
Before I go on about how great the concert was—it was great—I want to mention that I took that photo. I specifically want to mention this because Leah and I just bought a new digital camera that is fully manual. While at the concert I was using all of the camera’s auto/pre-saved settings and I couldn’t get any good shots. So I switched the camera over to manual and played with the setting until I got some good shots. I say they are good in the sense that I have no idea what I was doing, but I really want to know. That’s why I bought a camera with manual options. So I played with the F-stop (?) and that other option until the shutter and lighting matched up for something good. I put all the good ones on Flickr. I think they came out rather nicely. But I know a few of you (dad and Brenda) know about photography so please feel free to give me some feedback/advice.
The concert
I have written about Josh Ritter before and asked you to listen. I was originally introduced to Josh Ritter via Matthew Good; Matt did a cover of Girl in the War. Ever since then I have been totally blown away by both Ritter’s writing and musical capabilities, so when I went to the concert I expected it to be good. However, I was shattered.
I think, for me, the most amazing thing about the concert was to see Josh Ritter as a person. When he came on stage he was like a kid in a candy store. He was almost shaking he was so excited. And he was so charismatic that it wasn’t the audience giving him energy, but him giving energy to the audience. He certainly has a very powerful presence. I couldn’t help but be excited, because he was so excited. It’s like when someone else laughs, I usually laugh too. It’s contagious. His passion was contagious. The other neat thing was that while he sang (slower) songs he was perfectly still and sang beautifully, but as soon as he was finished he started bouncing and almost prancing on the stage. Like he was awkwardly floating.
It was a true pleasure watching him. It was also very inspiring. Good art is like steroids for a artist. I feel pumped up.
Ridiculous use of the word ‘shattered’ – you know what it really means in British vocab anyway. Are you starting a new Canadian meaning for the word?
The pictures are very good Rhett. As you use the manual settings more you will learn their impact on the image. F-stop= the size of the lens opening, it controls your depth of field (how much is in focus) and shutter speed= how long your lens is open and exposing the sensor to light, if you want to stop blurred images then you have to reduce shutter speed. Your image of the keyboard player was very good in that it showed movement by the hands but the head was in focus. At a concert like this you can also try to capture images without a flash because the stage lights are quite bright – sometimes you will get colour shifts as a result giving a very interesting image. The flash will a light comparable in colour mix to the sun and you will lose the colour shift.
Shattered, haha . . . yes, I think you used the word incorrectly.
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Leah and Jana are both knackered in the head.
Thanks Dad. I didn’t use flash for any of those pictures. Using the auto settings all the shots were really bright. I think the camera had a hard time with the bright and all the dark around it.