Twin City Photos

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Last stop on my Saturday afternoon photo wandering around downtown Minneapolis, down at St. Anthony Main, biked past this band and just had to stop to take a few pictures. The Lovers Show advertise their music as “Poptrical Sophistifunk!!!” and it looks like they’re having a lot of fun, doesn’t it? Noni sure is energetic, and I only got a few shots out of the 20 or so where she wasn’t partially blurred. Place was packed, otherwise I would have grabbed a seat and hung around for bit and listened to more. Their next engagement in town is on August, 16 2008 at Outdoor Concert Series St. Anthony Main. Hope to make it there early enough to find a seat.

I finally found at least some of my pictures, requested by a fellow blogger from the Netherlands, taken on a business trip to Naples, Italy. In Italy you don’t have to go far to find interesting scenes. This one was taken from my hotel room window. Note how the arches under the switchback road have been turned into housing. Must be noisy.

Good possibility I’m going back for a few days in the near future. This time I’ll spent more time looking around.

I’ve become fascinated with capturing flames. This time I decided to experiment with shutter speeds and f-stops to both freeze the flame as much as possible while preserving depth of field. Took about 60 shots and some of them are quite interesting (more to come), especially at the higher shutter speeds (1/2000th to 1/4000th of a second). Haven’t decided yet whether the difference between what you normally see looking at a campfire and what the camera captures is because your eyes average the flames or the camera fails to capture portions of the flames. It’s probably a bit of both.

When I first looked at the pictures on my computer at home I was disappointed with what appeared to be a fair amount of noise in the black areas of the pictures, but for some reason it disappears once I process the raw files into jpegs. This shot was taken at 1/2000th of second, F/5.6, ISO 800, with a Canon EF50mm f/1.8.