Last Friday one of my friends (John Reisinger) invited me to shoot his son’s band (Select Start) performing at the Transitions Art Gallery. Along with Select Start, few other bands were performing that night - Asteria, One For The Team, Inertia and Cassady. Shooting the concert was fun but I quite challenging. Lighting was quite poor and at times non-existant (Select start performed in almost complete darkness) so I ended up using a lot of flash. Bouncing off the walls, pumping into the ceiling and sometimes even shooting straight at. The 14-24 and 70-200 ended up carrying most of the workload.

Equipment used:
Nikon D300, SB-800, Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8, Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8, Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR

Watching this year’s Eurovision was a blast! A lot of very colorful performances. Congratulations to Russia with the 1st place, Ukraine came in 2nd and Greece was 3rd.

My personal favorite was France. Since we were not allowed to vote for Ukraine, France was my pick. We did actually participate in the live voting process by sending SMS messages from our cell phones to the number provided on the screens of our TVs during the contest.

Sebastien Tellier’s “Divine” [the French performer I liked] was a very unique (musically as well as vocally) composition. I didn’t quite understand the meaning of the song at first (I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the word ‘Chivers’), but later when I found out what it meant, the song started to make some sense to me :)

Lyrcis can be found here

And the story behind this song (as well as the meaning of C.H.I.V.E.R.S) can be found here .

“Culture shock” would be a good way to describe the way I felt my first day in Odessa. Every time I come here the city changes so much… And there is always soooo much going on around here. As we were driving home from the train station my brother proudly announced that he’s got us tickets to go see a Moscow jazz band (Trans Atlantic) playing with an American Jazz star - Eric Marienthal. I knew nothing about either one of them; however, it all sounded like fun anyways. Unfortunately, something came up at work and neither my brother nor my dad could make it to the concert that night, so my mom and I went by ourselves…

And what a concert it was! No words can express what we saw and heard… Eric, as well as the rest of the guys were simply incredible. My mom cried watching them play. After the concert I read few local blogs and everyone was simply stunned by their virtuosity and talent.

Luckly, I just happened to have my D70 with me (with the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR). I had to crank ISO all the way to 1000; however, built in noise reduction did a marvelous job as you can witness here.

Tonight, Florida Orchestra concluded its free “Pops in the park” series of the 2006-2007 season with an amazing performance at a park in north Tampa. Lots of our friends came out to see this concert, and we all truly enjoyed a wonderful night of beautiful music. The smog from the burning fires in northern parts of Florida has finally cleared up and for the first time in last couple of weeks, being outdoors was quite pleasant again.

I did not have my camera with me this time; however, I did manage to snap few good photos last time the orchestra performed at the Coachman Park (Clearwater) less than a month ago. Unfortunately, the custom curve I had loaded after I got my D70 back from service was a bit too aggressive which resulted in minor loss of highlights, but overall I was quite pleased with the performance of the 70-200 VR. The picture I’m posting here is of a friend of ours - Eugene Bazhanov, Assistant Principal Second. He has been with The Florida Orchestra since 1991 and I’ve been fortunate to know him since the spring of last year. Tomorrow he’s celebrating his birthday, so I’m sure I’ll have some more pictures of him to report very soon! :-)