I am soooo excited tonight! So excited that I'm blogging at 2am after being out in the blazing sun all day. About a month ago I bought a zoom lens but I have not yet had the opportunity to put it to the test. Until today that is!
As I mentioned the other day, we are in Austin for the Austin City Limits Music Festival. So of course I had lots of opportunities to take pictures at the fest... see
The Stars
Gnarls Barkley
Cat Power
and while I love some of these shots I got at ACL, they are not what I'm excited about. After the fest tonight, we got tickets to see Sufjan Stevens at the Paramount Theatre. I bet you don't know Sufjan (but if you do, you must totally rock). He's one of the most amazing artists around right now, in fact, his last album topped every single decent music critic's Best of 2005 lists. His sound is so unique and wonderful, you can't help but love him (plus he's absolutely adorable). Seriously, go check him out. I recommend starting with Illinois. You can come back and thank me later. Ok, now we are finally to the point when I tell you why I'm so excited!!!! I snapped over 100 pics of Sufjan in the theater, and do you know why this is cool? Because I had to switch my camera out of manual mode and take pictures in low light without a flash with an f/4 lens which I'd heard would just not work. But guess what? It did!!! I figured out how to set it! And these pictures kill me, 122 amazing pictures!!!! Wanna know what my settings were? I set my ISO to 800 (so I would have a lot of worker bees), I put the camera in shutter priority mode, and set the shutter speed to 1/60 s. The results, PERFECTION! (As far as I'm concerned at least). Here's some proof!
Wow, do I rock or what? LOL. These 3 photos of Sufjan have not been cropped or retouched or anything. I resized for web and that was it! Oh, you are probably wondering about the wings. Fact is, Sufjan puts on one of the most incredible live shows you will ever witness. When he tours with a band, he likes to dress them up. Last tour they were all cheerleaders, this tour they are butterflies. He has almost an entire orchestra with him right now. Best show I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot.
Ok, well, i better get to bed, we have a long day in the hot Austin sun tomorrow. I've gotten a few emails that I need to respond to but I'm still "on vacation", I just had to post these pics cause they make me sooo happy!!!!
