Michelle Shocked at the Corner

Michelle Shocked played at the Corner Hotel last night. It was the first time I'd seen her live. Gigs at the Corner are usually smoke-free now, which is fantastic.
Tonchi McIntosh opened the show. He's getting pretty good. I remember he opened for Bruce Cockburn last year at the Brunswick Music Festival.
After some `Shockioke', hosted by band member Rich Armstrong, Michelle emerged with the band. It was a small band, and included well-known `local' Peter Luscombe on drums. Rich Armstrong proved himself to be an fluent multi-instrumentalist, with percussion, trumpet, flugal horn and vocal duties going down a treat. The house sound system is good too, and the marvellous use of delay and reverb effects on vocals and instruments complemented a hugely enjoyable and fatigue-free audio mix.
Michelle has an amazing set of lungs, although, she did admit to being a bit thin on the vocal side, 13 shows into a rigourous 16 date Australian tour. She noticeably eased off a bit toward the end, and *wisely* finished the show sans encore, "quitting while ahead". I didn't get a close look, but it looked and sounded like she sang into a Neumann 105 mic, which made short work of her enormous dynamic range.
Wow - her passion, talent and apparent ease with being herself made for a truly uplifting show.

Footy over for 2005

Well, the 2005 AFL season has come to a close. Worked for Network Ten on the Grand Final, in the Swans' room at the end of the game. It was pretty manic in there, with the all-singing-all-dancing team amid a throng of close fans. My role as audio assistant (microphones and IFB) quickly turned to include camera cable handler, as the cameraman dived into the wild torrent of jubilant folk, in pursuit of the sports presenter for Sports Tonight.

On another note...I heard quite-well-known London author and minister Dave Tomlinson speak last night at UrbanSeed church last night. It was an uplifting gathering. Mark Pierson displayed the excellent Digital Snapshot film as food for thought as we began.

Ah...location!

As pointed out by Paul Schmelzer and We Make Money Not Art, location is everything.

cameras, etc.

Well the D30 now has a companion. Just last week, I bought a secondhand Canon G5 from Ebay. Two years ago I was drooling over this camera, and now have one for under half its price when new.
I must say though, having used a digital SLR (albeit an old one) for the last year or so, SLRs really are the most enjoyable machines to use if you enjoy the practice of composing the shot and pressing the shutter and getting an instant response from the shutter inside. The G5 is still a fairly high-end compact, but, like compacts in general, there's still a short delay and feeling of `detachment' from the scene when you press the button all the way home. However, I sort of bought the G5 as more of an everyday knockabout camera, having lent my Panasonic compact digital to my sister who is overseas.
So is the G5 a good machine? It certainly feels the business - well built and well laid out. It's a 5 megapixel CCD camera. The resolution is a bit immaterial, I reckon. As far as I'm concerned I get excellent results on the old 3 megapixel EOS D30 - I nearly always shoot in raw mode and import the images from a Firewire card reader through Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. Much quicker than mucking about with direct USB 1 camera connections. Camera on-board image processing apparently has greatly improved over the last few years and I figure that by shooting raw with the D30 (circa 2000) I am reducing the amount of work that the camera has to do apart from just exposing its sensor to the world for short fractions of seconds.
There's no escaping the higher resolutions, though - the manufacturers make better, higher resolution chips for less money and can't help but incorporate them into the models that appear on the store shelves. Perhaps it is important for some people to always have the latest and greatest - higher resolution being a key selling point of the modern digicam gear. I now shoot with two secondhand cameras and process on a secondhand G3 Powerbook, and I believe that higher resolution images just make for more unnecessary work for an older computer like mine.
I took the G5 off and snapped a whole lot of shots around the St.Kilda Pier area on the weekend, and the results look ok on the computer screen. The pictures are good - but there is definitely quite a bit of noise in there. Best to keep the ISO setting as low as possible, I think.