mirgraphy

I discovered Laura Marling a while ago and managed to infect my housemate with her music as well. Consequently, while I was sick in bed she managed to hunt up some tickets for a sold out concert that was the perfect reason to recover as quick as possible, because there was not way in hell I miss watching Laura Marling live!

To those who are not familiar with her, her style of music is rock-folk think Joni Mitchell but in the same vein as Clare Bowditch. Every single review I have read can’t help but mention how young and mature she was (she’s 18), and I can’t help but do the same. Her voice was amazingly rich in person and even though I love her recording, listening to her live was a completely different experience. Despite her relative youth she was incredibly poised and charismatic on stage as well as being photogenic. She played a number of songs from her new album, definitely not as bright in tone as her first album, but looking forward to its release next year all the same.

The first photo on this blog was taken minutes before her last song, she was rather apologetically letting the crowd know that she doesn’t do encore on stage.

I managed to burrow my way to the front despite a rather unfriendly crowd who were more difficult to budge than normal. The closer to the front I managed to get, the younger and surlier the crowd. All photos were taken with my 50mm lens and incidentally to D90 users, Apple has finally released their Aperture patch for RAW files and this definitely made my life easier. That being said, I was a little surprised that the photos taken from that night did not require that much post processing as I would normally expect.

The supporting act for the night was a band called Jay Jay Pistolet, who did reminded us of  Josh Pyke somewhat. Must be the beard, and the style of music. It’s terrible making comparisons with Australian musicians all the time, but there are similarities! I am rather fond of his music and gave his EP a fair bit of a work out, check him out as well if you have time!

This is the first day of my life
Swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach

Bright Eyes – First Day of My Life

Thanks to all for the birthday wishes, particularly mum for forgetting about the time difference and woke me up with several missed calls at 3AM in the morning.

A birthday is a rather odd celebration.  Other than celebrating the fact  that one has managed to reach another year by avoiding being struck by lightning, run over by a bus or fallen down the stairs (woops did that already) not quite sure what to make of it really.

More importantly, I didn’t realise the D90 is not supported by Aperture as yet!

I swear time froze today. There were moments when I looked around and I could have sworn that I was stuck in an office that time forgot. In any case I finally gave in to temptation and decided to reward myself with a new camera.

The choice was between a D300 and a D90, but after considering factors like cost, the very cool video function and B and M advising me to get latter I decided to go with the D90.

At first glance it felt a lot like my D70, but after taking a  few shots the colours were much richer and it wa noticeably less noisy. Then again the D70 was noisy over any ISO higher than 400, so my expectation was pretty low in this regard. I still need to test it with flash to see how it compares with the old camera. One thing that was really frustrating with the D70 was that it could not cope with two different light source and will always overcompensate the flash.

As for the video function, it was actually a lot of fun. Simply taking very mundane shots was really effective when using my 50mm lens and because the colours were so rich it was instant eye candy.

With the birth/delivery  (?) of this new Nikon baby in my hand, it reminded me of the other October kiddies who are currently scattered across various continents. Strange to think that a mere 12 months ago we were all in the same city. For me, reading Mr. Tang’s explanation on his reasons for leaving Sydney struck a chord. I was tired of living the zombie like existence day revolved around work and it was just time to break free.

Nothing much while I dash back home, this little clip by Markus is a good summary why I now want a D90 as well as a great snap shot of the week in review.