Alexa Ray Joel

Blurmore

Yes THAT Joel. My wife and I are big fans of her father and couldn't resist (for 14 bucks) seing her at the Hard Rock Cafe in Baltimore last night. We got great seats right up front. I enjoyed the show. She writes her own songs and plays keyboards. Her style is soulful teenage angsty (she is 20) think Fiona Apple or Alicia Keys, though no where near as refined. She isn't bad, but it remains to be seen if she can refine herself enough to push into a market saturated with soulful perky 20 something singer songwriters trudging ahead in the tracks of Tori Amos.











All shot with 20D 85mm f1.8 in Raw and processed with ACR.

LeDude

I love that first shot... top notch. You might be interested in this thread (it is devoted to music).

Looks like you got an auto-focus on that mic, hence the unsharp mask... but, you might want to take the sharpening down a half notch b/c her head looks a little weird against that stain-glass window (which is a spectacular background... really helps seperate this shot from the typical keyboardist shot). Also, as is fairly typical, you got caught with a strong red light on her face. I might try a selective mask of the red-infused area there and try taking the temperature down or de-redding via the red channel curve. Just a couple thoughts to improve though, I really like it as is.

good shooting,
LeDude

p.s. somethin' funky going on the left of her neck (viewer's perspective) as it passes through the mic stand?

here's a quick a dirty example of the de-redification I was talking about:

Blurmore

LeDude wrote:

I love that first shot... top notch. You might be interested in this thread (it is devoted to music).

Looks like you got an auto-focus on that mic, hence the unsharp mask... but, you might want to take the sharpening down a half notch b/c her head looks a little weird against that stain-glass window (which is a spectacular background... really helps seperate this shot from the typical keyboardist shot). Also, as is fairly typical, you got caught with a strong red light on her face. I might try a selective mask of the red-infused area there and try taking the temperature down or de-redding via the red channel curve. Just a couple thoughts to improve though, I really like it as is.

good shooting,
LeDude

Weird that you thought these were sharpened, becuase I haven't even applied USM to any of them. I was pretty happy with the sharpness for this type of light. She was lit by 4 cans with gels 1 red 1 blue 1 amber 1 magenta, so I took the red all the way down to 2100 k and greened at -24, this gave a decent right side of her face and left some magenta on the left. I'm not a person for trying to get absolute color under ambient stage lighting, but the red channel masking is something I will try if I come up against a stronger shift than this.

LeDude

Blurmore wrote:

Weird that you thought these were sharpened, becuase I haven't even applied USM to any of them.

my bad... I was honed in on the sharp line between her head and the stained glass combined with the fact that the mic looked sharper than her face in general... a bad read on my part

(and I agree with what you did, esp. concerning the right side of her face, which I didn't touch)