My friend Mary-Louise and I went to see this play and it was magnificent. I really enjoyed the movie (twice), but the play adds something special and I think I enjoyed it even more. I got my favourite seats for this performance – first box on the top level of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, front row seats (there are only four seats in these boxes.)
From this vantage, you see everything clearly and from not so far away. And since I love to photograph live performances, I brought along my Fuji F770EXR, which has a 24-500 effective zoom range. That lets me get pretty close.
This camera fits in a pocket and so is easily brought in without attracting notice. This venue prohibits recording and photography, and I certainly would not record the performance. But stills are another thing. This camera is as far from professional quality as you can get, except for most phones, so I do not feel that I am threatening anyone by posting these as an advert for the play.
See it.
Seriously.
Anyway … the F770 is a fun camera to shoot, but it has a quirk that is shared by all Fujis of this class (and maybe all of them ever) …
That error hits out of the blue. For this reason, you need to bring a spare SD card always so that you don’t have to format a card with images on it. Of course, I was cavalier about it since it had been years since this error had hit me, but of course this would be the day. The first time I shot with this camera in several years. Sigh.
Luckily, it hit 10m in, so I lost perhaps 10 images. But I had never read the above until today, so I stumbled about frantically trying to remember how I cleared it the first time. In the end, I scorched the earth, which had unintended consequences. First, I reset the camera completely, which of course cleared my carefully tuned settings for concert photography. Then I stumbled about several times trying to remember the order in which to get the frame number to properly reset. I eventually got it, by which time the card was formatted and all settings were default.
I did not get everything back to what I consider normal for concert shooting (see my EXR guide for more info) so I ended up shooting at 3200 ISO, L sized jpeg, wide open aperture, and shutter from 1/80 to 1/320 … moving it up and down as needed. After 90m, I realized that I was not shooting RAW, so I switched to that for the last few images, but by that time I was running out of battery – and in my infinite stupidity I had chosen to leave a spare battery at home. Dumb dumb dumb …
Anyway … the 3200 ISO jpegs are not horrible, and the rae images at the end are ok. The gallery is here:
http://letkeman.net/SnapShots/index.php?f=concerts/kinkyboots_01-01-2017
A few samples to whet your appetite …
So off you go … find a performance close by and enjoy …
