RETRO REVIEWS
Retro Review: The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
The Crane Wife. In my opinion, this is The Decemberists at the peak of their songwriting and record-making prowess. The Island (track 2 on The Crane Wife) might be my favorite 12 minutes of music released in the last 25 years. So dynamic and cinematic. The music isn't just a passive vessel to carry the lyrics. It's a fully built out set on which the story unfolds.
podcasts
Concert Photos
behind the edit
Behind every photo is a story. Read the stories behind some of our favorite photos, how we approach photographing and editing and much more!
Before / After – Mt Joy
Not only do I enjoy their music, but they are super fun, albeit a bit challenging to photograph as well. They use lots of fog and heavily saturated backlighting with minimal front light. That can make for a lot of trial and error in the pit as the brightness of the lighting can vary drastically moment to moment. My approach to a show like this is to start by figuring out the settings for the darkest moments I’m trying to capture. My goal is usually to keep my shutter speed around 400 or higher and my aperture at f4.0 or higher and then figure out the lowest I can set my ISO and still get usable photos. I do this because, as I mentioned previous Before/After posts, I’d rather have noise than motion blur or too shallow of depth of field. Once that’s set I try to keep my aperture the same and only roll my shutter speed to adjust exposure. By doing that, I’m able to focus on only changing one setting through the whole time I’m shooting...