I could have gone normal

While enjoying some cool live jazz and a few cocktails with my wife at NOLA last evening, I thought I would try to get some pics of the band on our way out. The thought of it was one thing but the execution was another. The lighting was typical for a bar/restaurant – dark, so that was one strike. Behind the band, the restaurant was open to the street, which was much brighter – another strike. So what to do? Use flash? No, too normal and disruptive. Let’s see, I had the fastest lens I own on the camera, an f1.4 which does extremely well wide open, so how about cranking the ISO and shooting wide open? Nope, tried it and again, too normal. Mind you, the photos I did take using those techniques are nice but they just didn’t do anything for me, so I went into my panic mode which is – just go crazy!! So I just played around with slow shutter speeds and camera movement. The problem with this technique is you never know what you are going to get. I can try to be precise all I want but the results are often not. It’s hit and miss – trial and error. Lots of error. 🙂

Another cool thing, for me at least, was that I got to talk about guitars with the guitarist in the band during a break, who played a beautiful Gibson L-5, which he recently acquired. It’s always nice to run into a stranger and have that common interest