Bramz’ warehouse

The night after Best of the West (see previous post), two members of QuiOui performed at Vijverpop as the Waxdolls. They are called the electropunk revelation of Bruges or Ghent (depends on who’s reporting it =), and they definitely have a bright future ahead.

Vijverpop is a festival organised by a school in Bruges. Though it is a very small festival, it cleary showed what difference it makes when there’s enough light and a bit of smoke. Enough light means you can shoot at faster shuttertimes and have more pictures that are sharp and well exposed. With a bit of smoke, you get nice colours all over your image instead of ugly walls and ceilings.

Being very pleased with the colours, I didn’t even try to convert to black and white. Instead, I even increased the local contrasts and colour saturations to give it extra punch. It does fit the electropunk better, I think.

link to complete series

It’s been exactly two months ago that I’ve followed QuiOui for a second time to a concert. But somehow, I’ve only now managed to get all pictures online … Place to be was JC Ten Goudberge in Wevelgem. The concert bill featured all medallists of Westtalent 2007: Low Vertical, QuiOui and Steak Number Eight.

The lighting conditions were difficult at best. Two stands with four spots each in impossible locations with colour combinations of which I didn’t know they existed. For Steak Number Eight, they altered it to mainly reds with some spots on the floor behind the drums. Which was actually very cool to see, but possibly even worse for picture taking. The f/2.8 of my 17-55mm was just too slow, and the 50mm f/1.8 was constantly hunting for focus. So at the end, taking pictures was more a matter of sheer luck.

Though the pictures aren’t great in an absolute sense, there are still some that I really like. Most of them are very low key and have to build upon atmosphere rather than sharpness. In case of Steak Number Eight, I’ve tried to exaggerate this by applying an unsharp mask with a very large radius to the lightness channel to increase the local contrast.

Links to complete series: Low Vertical, QuiOui, Steak Number Eight.

I’ve known Morda pretty much since the early days. Vague memories of some gigs in the Frontline, at the old location opposite to the Vooruit. Innerface, of the split album with Trust, still is one of my favourite tracks, on par with much of the Azerion album (which is just awesome, btw). Knowing their guitar player Doc and former vocalist VeganPietn from a distant past in KSA, it was inevitable that sooner or later, I would get them in front of my lens. The first opportunity was at BoscoRock festival in Kortrijk, where I’ve also shot Steak Number Eight (view series). Originally, Kudos was also going to perform on that festival, but they’ve cancelled.

The crowd was going wild, as usual, but I had got myself a nice spot in the front pit. The lights were rather basic, there was lots of white. Because of this, I was planning to go black & white exclusively. But it turned out some of the shots still have some nice colours, some ochre with a tad of blue.

Link to complete series

PS: many kudos to KSA Marke for retrieving my cellphone!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any update my photo gallery (ignoring the band shots of Waxdolls and Kudos). The Red Rock Rally pictures, take about a month ago, are finally uploaded now. My friends from Kudos participated in the contest and went home with the audience award. I feel a bit bad about this delay, but now everything is getting up to speed again. There are three sets of pictures: the headliners of the night Balthazar and Absynthe Minded, and of course Kudos.

A while ago I also added Steak Number Eight playing at BoscoRock, and you can expect pictures of Morda playing there very soon. Finally there are others still of QuiOui, Low Vertical, Steak Number Eight again, and Waxdolls from other gigs … phew!

PS: kudos to lyc, no pun intended.

By popular demand, here are two band shots I’ve taken. I not usually do band shots like this (in fact, these are the only two), as I’m more comfy with natural/candid shots.

The first one is of the electro punk duo Waxdolls. It was taken at Cultuurkapel De Schaduw, after the Quioui gig.

The second one is of the rock band Kudos, a few days after they’ve won the audience award at Red Rock Rally. The local newspaper Brugsch Handelsblad was going to feature an article, and they needed a band shot. As I hadn’t any good ones from the gig, I went to their rehearsal space a few days later to shoot this one. The same article was also published in the local edition of Het Nieuwsblad. At any rate, this is my first published picture =)

Since my first concert shoot, I’ve spent a little cash on a new lens: the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM with fashionable lens hood. Eager to test my new toy, I followed QuiOui to their next gig. We ended up in a small but magnificient venue in the middle of nowhere, Cultuurkapel De Schaduw in Aardooie.

Half electronics, half acoustics, half analog, half digital. That’s one way to describe the sound of QuiOui, of course not a very informative one. Best is to just listen for yourself. Definitely check out the Venimente track on their myspace page. You’ll love it!

How did the new lens perform? Well, it is a full stop slower than my 50mm f/1.8, resulting in somewhat more motion blurred images. The IS does compensate very well for the camera shake, but it of course doesn’t help to freeze the musicians. Nevertheless, I feel that the images have much better definition so that at the end, I had more good ones to choose from. The wide angle zoom is everything I needed in this type of venue. But a 70-200mm f/2.8 is of course still on the wishlist =)

Link to complete series

It’s been a year since I’ve bought my digital SLR camera, and I’ve decided to try some concert photography. For my first concert shoot, I was lucky enough to accompany After All to Ieper. The local band In Chains was promoting their new album Demolition Business, and After All was headliner of the night. They played a wicked show as always. With songs like Frozen Skin and Violent Decline, it’s hard not to.

Obviously, I’ve made a lot of beginner mistakes, like shooting too many pictures instead of concentrating on just a few. The curse of the digital era some might say, and they are probably right. I must also learn to stay longer in one spot instead of hopping around, especially if I can keep shooting the whole gig. Yet, I was able to return home with some pics I’m fairly satisfied of. I especially like the black & white ones.

Gratitude to After All for giving me this opportunity.

Link to complete series

You remember this little slip-up of DreamHost? While some people got into serious troubles with overcharges, which is of course totally to be regretted, in my case I actually made a profit out of this. How? Well, let’s see:

• On 16 January, they charged me 119.40 USD at a rate of 1.459 USD per EUR, which is 81.85 EUR.
• They refunded me the same amount on 18 January at 1.447 USD per EUR, which is 82.51 EUR.

So, I’ve made a net profit of 0.66 EUR or 0.96 USD! That’s 0.8%. Well, it’s not much of course, but who knows? It might be the start of a small fortune =)

How do I regard DreamHost after this two million dollar mistake? Rather positively, I think. Of course, I wasn’t one of those people who got in financial problems, but I do appreciate their open and honest way of dealing with it. Maybe a little too open, if you read their first blog post. At least, they didn’t try to cover it up, and are willing to compensate everyone who got overcharges beyond the actual refund without whining over it. Even to refund the remaining of your contract if you decide to leave because of this. Are they going to loose money? Are they going to loose customers? Sure thing, but perhaps this way, it’s going to save their face on the long run.

The BNR Metal Pages is some sort of encyclopedia of metal bands. I’ve been using it seens ages to look up lineups - present and past - and released albums. Thanks to the yearly top tens and the author’s commentaries you often also get a fairly good view of what records to buy as an introduction to a band.

To ease access to the pages, I’ve made a search plugin for both Firefox and IE7, and other browers that support the OpenSearch search engine specification. It sits right there in the corner where you find that search field for Google or Live Search, as an alternative engine to select. It’s like some sort of intelligent bookmark. To use the plugin, you select the BNR Metal Pages search engine from the drop down box, enter the keywords and hit return.

To install the plugin, you can either use a direct install within the browser, or download the file first and install it manually (if you know how =). I also have given the plugin to the owner of the site who’s glad to try it out himself.

Share and Enjoy!

One thing was still wrong in my perfect Thunderbird/GMail setup: the Trash folder. The default location of the trash folder in Thunberbird is not the same as GMail’s. So, if you want things to work seamlessly, you also need to remap that one. For this one, there are no user-friendly settings you can tweak though. You need a bit of hardcore config editing:

1. Go to Tools > Options and click on Config Editor on the General tab.
2. Find a key of the form mail.server.serverN.hostname with the value imap.gmail.com.
3. Create a new key mail.server.serverN.trash_folder_name and give it the value [Google Mail]/Deleted Items [Google Mail]/Bin.
4. Restart Thunderbird
5. …
6. profit

update 12 January 2008: Apparently, Google has changed the name of the trash folder from Deleted Items to Bin …