Neil & Ol' Black in London, 3/14/08: The Story Behind The Picture

Photo by Chris a.k.a Crris b

Here's an interesting photo from Apollo Hammersmith, London, England, 3/14/08. It was quite a night by all accounts as Neil Young wound down his Europe tour. The concert was filmed and at the bottom of the frame you can see the video screen for one of the cameras.

Another interesting aspect of the photo is the story behind the photo. Chris writes on her putting together the picture:

On the 2 nights saw Neil at Hammersmith I was miles away. On night of 14th decided I was going to take my DSLR. I was in stalls row L, right at the very end. My camera is a SONY A700. I do have a long white fast zoom lens, but thought it inappropriate/inadvisable to take that :) Minolta lenses with the same A mount are compatible. I have a Minolta 135mm f2.8 that I love. I took that, and a Sony 70-300 but latter too slow & soon swapped over to the Minolta. (A700 not full frame so 135mm=202.5mm).

After a couple of test shots realized needed to stop down by 2 stops, so all photos taken -2 exposure compensation. The "Neil & Ol' Black" is actually a cropped picture. I like to shoot on Aperture priority mode, so left open at 2.8 The A700 will do and give ISO settings down to 6400, but anything over 800 is so very noisy. Still one way of getting the shot, and then a case of seeing what you can do in Photoshop.

I've made various actions, but the one I actually used on "Neil & Ol' Black" was one I downloaded called LOMO [LOMOGRAPHY - over-saturated, blurry, cross processed look]. Then I took original crop & merged the 2 - the LOMO crop pic & the original crop pic into an HDR image [HDR stands for HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE. The idea is one takes RAW (unprocessed in camera) pictures of the same image with varying exposures, and then combine them. So one could have one picture with excellent dark tones and another with excellent light tones- combining them into an HDR image should then give the widest possible dynamic range.]

OK could not resist - just had a go at HDR combining the Neil & Ol' Black" Image with the "fill-flash/vig effect variant" - interesting punchy [bringing up blacks] result. I de-noised all pics using Noise Ninja but this can give some doll-like glassy skin textures, so I tend to fade the effect a bit & keep some noise.

Not sure I followed all that but sounds cool. Thanks for the effort and info.

paz!
Thanks Chris!

Also, see concert reviews of London, England - 3/14 & 15/08.

---