Cynthia is well underway on her latest quilt. I am not allowed to publish pics yet, but I captured this one from the hall which has been screened and approved for release.
This is one of her coolest quilts yet. I can’t wait till it’s done so I can photograph it properly.
The Tom Waits show was literally fantastic. Not only the performance, but the cast of characters in attendance. I got to see many current friends as well as people I don’t tend to run into except every so often when an event like this rolls around.
I struggled with the idea of not bringing a camera and I knew that cameras were technically verboten but I really wanted to get some shots of this once in a lifetime show.
It’s been many many years since I smuggled a camera into a concert. The last time was at a Frank Zappa concert in 1984. I pondered tucking a camera as I could not imagine the staff of Jones Hall patting people down or scanning anyone with metal detecting wands. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do that so I opted to bring my Alpha 100 with the good old 50mm lens for a low profile shoulder bag “hope they don’t make me go back to the car” casual walk through the front door and what do you know? It worked. In hindsight I should have brought the new camera and bigger lens. Ah well, live and learn.
Once the show was underway point and shoot cameras as well as pocket video lit up the audience and the staff at Jone Hall did nothing to stop any of it so I snagged a few shots of my own.
The set list from the show:
Lucinda
Down in the Hole
Falling Down
November
Dead and Lovely
Lie to Me
Day After Tomorrow
Hoist that Rag
Get Behind the Mule
Cemetary Polka
Trampled Rose
Jesus Gonna Be Here
Lucky Day
Tom Traubert’s Blues
House Where Nobody Lives
Innocent when you dream
Make it Rain
Murder in the Red Barn
Come on up to the House
Dirt in the Ground
Eyeball Kid
Goin’ Out West
All the World is Green
For a recap of the show itself you can check out the story at The Houston Chronicle
The above two photos are my favorites of the evening. The rest are here in my gallery.
Click image to view larger size. Or even better, see a larger version on a black background.
This is my second pass at this image. I was able to clean up the chromatic aberration that was distracting in the original image as well as the HDR version. I have also (I believe) brought out more of the "menace" in the clouds. I was also FAR less aggressive in correcting the angle than I was in the first version allowing the building to have the appearance of bowing or bending in the wind that comes from shooting at a slightly up-angle with a an ultra wide angle lens like the 11-18mm
The Allen Oldies Band celebrated the release of their new album “Ride The Wild Surf” last night at the Continental Club. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.
Especially entertaining was Tomas Escalante (Suspects/Clouseaux/El Orbits) and his son singing backup on “Sweets for My Sweet”, a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and originally recorded by The Drifters in 1961.
Cynthia had the idea to put together a clone shot that would portray how she sees the distribution of the workload around here. I was able to hammer this out in about an hour. Click to see full size:
In optics, chromatic aberration is caused by a lens having a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens).
In real ife what it means is that in some lighting situations my ultra-wide angle lens shows some abnormalities in the form of colored fringing on objects to the far left and the far right of my images as evidenced in my recent photo of the lightning strike over 610 in Uptown.
This is taken from the left side of the original image:
As you can see, the building has a red border along the right edge that is also noticeable along the top of the tree line. If you look at the HDR image I rendered from the original RAW file you will see that the cromatic aberration is much more pronounced.
This is pushing me to learn more about post processing software tools. I have been experimenting the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and the initial results are promising:
Click image to see full size