((szene)) Wien has a series of summer events called Chill and Grill which utilizes the garden and the outdoor stage. As part of that, Gini Ernst played a set with her band and once again showed why she is one of Austria's favourites at the moment! I went lightly equipped with just the EOS M, the 22mm 2.0 pancake lens and the squishy Lensbaby Spark. It's not always easy to focus quickly but with a bit of practice I think it works quite nicely!
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Virginia Ernst is flying high at the moment - on #2 of the OE3 charts for the second week running, performing all over the place and having had multiple television interviews recently. I went to see her sing at Sand In The City in the heart of Vienna and was happy to bring her together with my friends from Archetype Apparel so that she could become part of the Family Of Sirs... I am really looking forward to seeing more of Virginia - she has an incredible amount of energy and drive, more talent than a person should have, and an infectious smile! Stay tuned for more from her including new promo shots for her upcoming video! In terms of lighting I was really cursing because they use those red and blue LED batteries of hexagonal lights. I detest those lights. However, they seem to be inexpensive and last long, so I can understand that venue owners invest in them. I guess catering to the live photographer is not their business... apparently the paying audience takes priority!
First of all I need to admit that Gini's music is not exactly my usual fare and I do need a dose of Mastodon to make me feel like my testosterone levels are not dropping too far. However, she does have an absolutely amazing voice and friends of ours saw she would be performing live so I offered to shoot the gig. It was totally great. I am so impressed with how good her voice sounds live and I can really see why her new single is being played on numerous radio stations and the video is being shown all over the place! Check it out here. Anyway, just LED lighting in red, magenta and blue at the Cafe Carina, so I had to mess about with the levels a lot and convert to black and white to get something useful, but in the end I got some nice shots: Virginia Ernst is a singer / songwriter (check her out at https://www.facebook.com/OfficialVirginiaErnst) who I met while shooting at the Fitfabrik a few weeks back. We got into talking and she asked me whether I would be available for promoshots... guess what my answer was? So I met up with Virginia to get some shots for her new single "Rockin'" - the song has references to a train and therefore we decided to meet up at a train station to get some shots in on the rails and possibly on the platform. It was a bit overcast so almost ideal for this kind of stuff, and Virginia was happy to walk and jump on the rails - which is what I had initially envisioned as the best place for the CD cover:  185mm, ISO 100, 1/320s, f/4.0 - one Speedlite camera right at 1/4, one Speedlite as backlighting also camera right at 1/16. I used the trusty 70-200 for this shot and edited it a little bit in Color Efex in order to get the faded look. I tried a different look as well below in order to have it a bit more contrasty and cinematic:  Same settings as above I thought we had some nice stuff here but we also wanted a couple of shots on the platform so we tried that as well - and it turned out to be perfect! There was absolutely nobody there and we were able to use the whole length of the platform. I changed to the 50mm lens though because I wanted to see if I could get good use out of f/2.0:  50mm, ISO 100, 1/400s, f/2.0 - one Speedlite camera left at 1/4 and one Speedlite as backlight camera right at 1/64 It was important to get the clock into the shot as there is a reference to 7:30 in the song - the final image had a bit of editing done on the fly by my friend Dani Hofer. I used Color Efex again to get the faded summery look. Anyway the one that made it finally is actually this one which is a little on the soft side but that makes the text stand out perfectly:  Let me know what you think. I'm quite happy with the result.
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Just a place to log my photographic activities and share some thoughts. Archives
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