Some concert shots...

Tim Kamppinen

These were taken in the town I went to college in, at a house that often hosts live music... in a living room. This particular show was an acoustic set featuring local musicians, many of which live at the house in question. Most of them are still in college, and several of them actually live at the house in question. Anyway, every time they have music there 60+ people cram into the small quarters and there's no room to move or breath and it gets hot and claustrophobic... and there's great music. So this time I brought my D40 with my 50mm 1.4 (manual focus, not the new af-s one... I wish) and took some photos while standing in the teeming throng. I decided to process them all as B&W shots, and here are the results. Let me know what you think: (just realized there are some ugly compression artifacts in several of these. That's because I they're linked from facebook. I'm on dialup internet so I just resize files and use facebook for hosting because it's so much faster. The originals are clean though, so try to ignore it if you can.

#1



#2


#3



#4



#5



#6



#7



# 8



#9



#10 The focus was way off in this one (on the back wall) but I loved the expression so I did what I could to salvage it. I tried blurring the backgorund more than the subject but I couldn't make it look realistic. Not great, but I guess it's better than not having a shot of this guy (a friend of mine):



As a side note, if you like folk music check out "This is Deer Country" on myspace. It's the band with the guy playing guitar and the girl singing (the viola player just joins them for live shows sometimes). They're really good and Kate has an amazing voice IMO.

divamum

Tim, these are terrific captures! I especially love #2 - the way you've used dof on that is just excellent

The only one I'm not sure about is #7 - I can see what you were going for, but I find the heads distracting rather than context-setting - I could just about live with that, but the clear-as-can-be white frilly curtain in the background is kind of the dealbreaker on that one..... For the record, you minimised the impact of that curtain so well in the other shots that I didn't even realise it was there until I went back and looked again after noticing it in #7!

Great job on these.

Tim Kamppinen

Thanks a lot. For the one with the curtain and heads, I was at the back of the room, maybe 15-20 feet from the performers. I was still shooting at 1.4 from what I remember, but at that focal distance the depth of field wasn't nearly as shallow. Hence the background not being blurry like the other shots, where I was like 5 feet or so away. This shoot really made me regret the fact that I bought a D40 instead of something higher. I've had it for a year and it's great for most of what I do, but the lack of an internal autofocus drive really sucks. I got my manual 50mm 1.4 for about $70 on ebay. I could have got an AF 1.8 50mm for $30 more but because I have a D40 it wouldn't have manual focused anyway. Now I find myself in the difficult position of wondering weather to spend the money on more expensive AF-S lenses now, knowing that they will still be great glass when I upgrade cameras at some point, or to upgrade my camera and buy some cheaper glass that would still probably be good enough, knowing that this way I'd have a much wider selection to choose from... arrrggh...

Agnieszka

Very nice photos & cool expressions.

cameralogic

Great job! #5 is my favorite. I love her expression, I can really connect with the moment.