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Kris Roe acoustic

Feb 1

Posted by Haydn in Gigs, Photography | No Comments

I'd been dreading this gig, on the basis that I love Blue Skies, Broken Hearts Next 12 Exits, and wasn't convinced that seeing it acoustic and live would live up to my expectations, and might ruin the record. Man, how wrong was I?

<strong>Kris Roe - acoustic set.</strong><br />Copyright Haydn Williams 2009

Kris Roe - acoustic set.
Copyright Haydn Williams 2009

The set was a mixture of BSBH, So Long, Astoria and End if Forever. Kris was chatty throughout, he spoke with the crowd rather than just to us, and most of all he was faithful to the original songs without ever being boring. It's obvious from the lyrics that the songs mean a lot to him, and that passion was really what made the live performance so good. It takes a lot for a solo acoustic gig to be a total success, but this undoubtedly was.

<strong>The entirety of Kris' kit.</strong><br />Copyright Haydn Williams 2009

The entirety of Kris' kit.
Copyright Haydn Williams 2009

Photography-wise, Kris asked for the front gels to be turned off, and so was playing in almost complete darkness. This didn't make life very easy! Despite f1.8 and ISO3200, there was still plenty of motion blur and focussing problems. The sheer number of people didn't help, so it wasn't a terribly successful night in terms of image-making. I also found it quite ridiculous how many people thought it totally fine to spend an entire set firing flashes at an artist. To my mind, it's rude and distracting, and I really do think people should have some consideration both for the artist and the rest of the crowd before photographing (or worse, videoing with a constant light). But that's just one of my little bug-bears!

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Back to Basics with SB6

Aug 7

Posted by Haydn in Gigs, Photography | No Comments

Last night was Grown at Home, 3 Storeys High and Sonic Boom 6 at the Vic Inn, in Derby. Despite the ludicrous temperature in there (as always) it was another good night. At the last minute I decided to take the camera along, but didn't want to carry much because I was cycling to the station. So, I went back to basics and took only the 50mm f/1.8 lens; no other lenses, and no flash. I shot all night at ISO 3200 and f/1.8, with the intention of all the shots being converted to monochrome.

Laila. (c) Haydn Williams 2008

Laila. (c) Haydn Williams 2008

The shot above was one of the first ones I got – they've changed the lighting a bit since I was last at the Vic, and there's now two yellow cans pointing right at centre-stage. It works pretty well. None of the shots on this page have had anything done to them except conversion to monochrome and sharpening for the web.

Ben. (c) Haydn Williams 2008.

Ben. (c) Haydn Williams 2008.

I was stood right in front of Ben, and without the wide-angle it was hard to get much of him in the frame. As usual, the crowd were going crazy so there wasn't much room to manoeuvre. Even so, I've not cropped any of the shots on this page, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

Barney Boom. (c) Haydn Williams 2008.

Barney Boom. (c) Haydn Williams 2008.

I like the Vic because you can always get to the side of the stage, and pretty much behind the band. Combined with the lights in front of the stage, you can get some good crowd shots if the band have got them interested enough. As you can see from the shot of Barney above, the crowd were loving it last night.

It's all about the energy. (c) Haydn Williams 2008.

It's all about the energy. (c) Haydn Williams 2008.

Finally, the last shot just sums up SB6 for me. Every time I see them, they give it 100%, and last night was no exception. I have no idea what the temperature in there was, but suffice to say it was very very hot. It was obviously really hard work up there on stage, and yet no-one in the band stayed still for more than about half a second throughout the entire set. To top it all off, they then followed it up with a cracking encore; an excellent new song (which I'll confess I can't remember the name of), and Monkey See Monkey Do to finish. Bloody brilliant.

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Lightroom 2.0 Released

Jul 29

Posted by Haydn in Photography | No Comments

Lightroom version 2.0 has officially been released. Obviously there's the official Adobe page, but the "Lightroom Journal" blog run by the Lightroom team also has some more info. There's plenty of other stuff floating around the web  already, and the release is covered on sites like John Nack's blog, Scott Kelby's blog, and Lightroom Killer Tips.

Lightroom 2 - no longer a beta version

More specifically, there are feature reviews on computer-darkroom.com, lightroomnews.com. John Nack has promised to keep his list of resources up-to-date, so it's probably worth checking back there fairly regularly. In terms of tutorials, you've got the NAPP LR2 Learning Center, some free videos at PhotoshopCafe.com, and a demo of the new retouching features by Terry White. There are loads of lessons on the Kelby Training website, which apparently offers a free trial, but I've not tried it so I don't know how much you can view before having to pay. And of course, there's some info on the Adobe website itself, including a complete list of all new features, and some helpful videos in the "Design Center".

Lightroom 2.0 can now use Export Plugins, along with Develop presets and a variety of web galleries. You can find these new Export Plugins along with the more familiar presets and galleries at the Adobe Lightroom Exchange site. There are only 16 listed at the moment, but it looks like this could be quite interesting as people find different uses for them.

In the midst of all the Lightroom 2.0 excitement, it's probably worth noting that Adobe have also released a couple of other bits of software at the same time. Camera Raw has been updated to v4.5, and now supports edits made in v2.0 of Lightroom. In addition, it adds support for DNG Profiles. These are a new feature which allow you to tune the default Camera Raw rendering of your raw files. For example, you could set up presets to match the JPG presets on your camera; it could be a really useful feature if you're not a big fan of the default ACR settings. Instructions on how to create custom profiles are on the Adobe labs site. There's more information in that computer-darkroom.com review.

Finally, it turns out that it costs more to download the 1.0 > 2.0 upgrade than it does to actually have a physical box/CD posted to you- go figure!

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Adobe Bridge installs Opera

Jun 18

Posted by Haydn in IT, Photography | 1 Comment

I double-clicked on a PHP file the other day, hoping to edit it in Eclipse. However, a funny thing happened – it opened in Opera. That's not necessarily funny in itself, but it is when you consider that I've never installed Opera. I use Safari, and since installing Leopard I haven't yet had to test any websites with other browsers. A quick investigation showed that Opera was actually installed as part of Adobe Bridge. Click the image below to see the Opera binary sat happily in a sub-directory of the Bridge installation.

Opera browser sat happily in the Adobe Bridge folder

My initial thoughts were that it would be something to do with displaying help, but according to a couple of other blog posts and the comments in them (example), it seems to be used to preview how things will display on mobile devices.

I can't say it's really the end of the world as far as I'm concerned, I just thought it weird that I wasn't asked or told about it during the Bridge install (at least, as far as I know I wasn't!). But anyway, if Opera has turned up on your system without your knowledge, maybe that's why!

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Less Than Jake, Camden Barfly

Jun 16

Posted by Haydn in Gigs, Photography | No Comments

On Friday night I went down to London to see Less Than Jake again. I know it's not really that long since their "6 Albums in 6 Nights" epic, but this gig was at the Camden Barfly. It's a tiny venue, and I wasn't going to miss the chance to see the band somewhere that size.

Less Than Jake - Camden Barfly (Copyright Haydn Williams 2008)

I was fortunate enough to get a photo pass again, so was down the front for the whole set. It was pretty cramped, and the lighting was mostly red gels – that meant lots of burnt out / posterised images, and problems with focussing. It was pretty busy too, which seems to be happening a lot lately.

Set-wise, there was a decent mix of stuff from the new album "GNV FLA" along with old favourites, but it would have been nice to have longer than an hour from them. There seemed to be a lack of banter compared to other gigs, but that could have been due to the short set time / curfew; either way it was still a lot of fun, and well worth the trip.

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Ljubljana Graffiti

Jun 7

Posted by Haydn in Photography, Travel | 2 Comments

I seem to have developed a habit of photographing graffiti on recent trips, and this visit to Slovenia is proving to be no exception. While a lot of the graffiti in Venice was just random text scrawled on the wall (and there was a lot of graffiti in Venice), and Postojna had a few decent pieces that I just wasn't able to get back to, Ljubljana seems to have rich pickings.

For starters, there's an area called Metelkova which started as a squat in a former Army barracks, and has now developed into an "autonomous" community. It seems that while the local government won't formally approve of people living in the buildings and pretty much doing as they like, they also haven't knocked it all down or actually evicted people. It seems a bit complicated, but the point is that there's loads of weird DIY stuff everywhere, and a load of graffiti to go with it.

Metelkova Grafitti. Copyright Haydn Williams 2008

Elsewhere, we've got that old classic…

punx not dead. Copyright Haydn Williams 2008

And finally, something I spotted on my way to Metelkova early this morning…

 

Skateboarding is a crime.

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Venice

Jun 6

Posted by Haydn in Photography, Travel | No Comments

We've recently spent two days in Venice on holiday, at the start of a trip which is now taking us around Slovenia for the next ten days. Venice has worked out pretty well; we've seen all the major sights like St. Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge. We always knew it would be chock-full of tourists from dawn to dusk, but it really does get incredibly busy around the main attractions. For me, that detracts from the overall experience, but I managed to get out early one morning and see a totally different side of the city. You can spend hours just wandering around the tiny side-streets, and I'd heartily recommend that as a plan of action if you do visit.

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It's also a very expensive city to sleep and eat in, although we found we'd done most of what we wanted to do after a couple of full days.

I've certainly felt safe during my time wandering around, including early in the morning when there were very few other people around. I had my camera out a reasonable amount, but didn't see that as a problem. Apparently pick-pockets are the main issue, but I guess all the usual travel precautions apply to deal with them.

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So all in all, a pretty good start to the trip. I'm not a big fan of cities and crowds, so if you're like me then come to Venice expecting to get the best of it before everyone else has woken up. During the day it may seem overcrowded, over-priced, and overly "tourist-ified", but if you catch it at the right time it's a very beautiful and totally unique city.

Edit: Scott Kelby has just published a blog post about shooting in Italy, including a bit about Venice. I have a sneaking suspicion that he's explained a little more eloquently than I about the prevalence of cliched shots and trying to avoid just taking them all day long. He's also got a gallery of his Venice shots up, which show his holiday shots are just as great as his work shots! I particularly like the high angles he's got on the gondolas.

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Mike TV / Zolof

May 29

Posted by Haydn in Gigs, Photography | No Comments

Back to Sheffield last night, to see Mike TV and Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer at Corporation. Despite a pretty poor turnout and a rather quiet crowd, I thought both bands were really good. There seems to be a real sense of apathy with regards to people going to gigs at the moment. I had the same experience last week with My Awesome Compilation in Derby; the crowd consisted of one of the support acts, me, and five other people. These are reasonable sized bands who I know have decent followings, and yet no-one's coming out to see them. It's a poor show, and makes you reflect on the fact that so many decent UK bands have called it quits in the last eighteen months.

John from Mike TV

Anyway, putting the tidings of doom for the UK scene to one side, I had a great night. Mike TV played a load of new stuff, with a few old (Pickled Dick) tracks in there too. The lighting was pretty awful for both Mike TV and Zolof, but I got a few decent shots.

Rachel from Zolof

It was the second time I've seen Zolof, and I had a bit more room than last time (when I shot from the crowd at a Motion City Soundtrack gig). Like Mike TV before them, they had a good mix of stuff from the current album and older releases, including one of my favourite tracks ever in the history of the world, 'Moment'. Shooting wise, I stuck mostly to the Sigma 70-200mm f2.8, used from the back of the room. There weren't many people there, so I had plenty of room to shoot between heads in the 'crowd'. To top it all off, I've just found out that Zolof are playing in Leeds in June, with the always-awesome Failsafe! Brilliant!

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Menorca

May 5

Posted by Haydn in Photography, Travel | No Comments

I got back from Menorca late last week, after spending a few days out there in the sun. For a tiny island there's some pretty cool stuff (and bizarre too – the island's only 30 miles by 12 miles wide at it's biggest points, but has nearly 10,000 miles of dry stone wall. Go figure.). Photographically it was an excellent trip, with some really nice sunrises and sunsets, like the one below from the tower at Fornells.

Haydn taking photos at Fornells Tower

In addition, we added another UNESCO site to the list of places we've visited. Not a World Heritage site this time, but a Biosphere Reserve – live the dream! To be fair, it was all pretty cool, especially the caves at Cales Coves which required a bit of cliff-face scrambling to get to, but then had coat hooks, and cooking range, cupboards etc inside. I'd say the island is definitely worth a visit; we felt we'd pretty much covered all the really important bits in five days, so I guess a week would be enough to get around the whole lot.

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Facebook Applications

May 2

Posted by Haydn in Gigs, Photography | No Comments

I've recently finished writing a couple of Facebook applications, which will show you a different photo each day from either my landscape portfolio or my gig portfolio. You can sign up to them using the links below:

Landscape shots – http://apps.facebook.com/haydnwilliams
Gig shots –  http://apps.facebook.com/punkrockportraits

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