This was shot at a "School of Rock Music" show. It's a school for kids ages 10-16ish to learn typical rock instruments and performance. It was a fun show. They were playing all Van Halen songs (which is fitting because the image definitely shows Van Halen style playing). It was a bit tough to shoot as it was relatively low light with fast action. This shot surprised me. I was generally seeking sharpness but knew I'd get some motion blur at times, hoping for the best. The combination of relatively slow shutterspeed and fast-moving fingers showed energy and, hopefully, gave a sense of sound. I like it because the fingers show movement but the face is still (blurred by shallow DoF but not motion blur).
This is one of those love it or hate it shots. My guess is that the majority of DPCers won't be into the motion blur or that the sound aspect of it isn't obvious enough, but it just struck me as a really cool image so I'm eager to see what comments I get.
I learned something about my camera on this shoot. I was switching lenses. My 50mm is f/1.8, which was good for low light. I switched to my 10-20mm f/4, so my minimum aperture was 4. When I switched back to my 50mm is stayed on f/4 instead going back to f/1.8 as it was when I took it off. I didn't check my aperture and thus accidentally shot at f/4 instead of f/1.8, which gave me the motion blue and also gave me more DoF. A good lesson in how my camera and lenses work.
I did a fair amount of post-processing to deal with the stage lights, try to bring out the movement as much as possible without total blur, and deal with heavy noise from ISO 1600.
Camera Raw - white balance, contrast, vibrancy, clarity, saturation, blacks, noise reduction, sharpen, color adjustments - hue/luminance/saturation, curves, recovery
CS3 - sharpen, selective color layer to balance colors and tone down some funky skin colors, border, save for web
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Place: 101 out of 142 Avg (all users): 4.8503 Avg (commenters): 4.5000 Avg (participants): 4.6038 Avg (non-participants): 4.9478 Views since voting: 688 Views during voting: 265 Votes: 187 Comments: 3 Favorites: 0
I was one of your 8 scores and I loved the finger motion for conveying the concept of sound. Belive it or not, I gave the blue ribbon winner the same score as yours. Not bad company to hang out with. Just wanted you to know that I enjoyed your image and that I am glad you entered it.
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