Thursday, September 11, 2014



Lorde singing a new cover, Heavenly Father, at the Mann Center, the first stop on her fall North American tour. So what is the story behind this grainy B&W image.

Fact one. I'm taking my granddaughter Charlotte. her current BFF, and our driver, Charlotte's mom, to the Lorde concert at the Harris Pavilion in Milwaukee. Since the venue has a pocket-camera-only policy I'm being forced to resurrect a 6mp Canon S3IS  that has been sitting ignored and half forgotten since I bought my first DSLR.

Fact two. Lorde has added a wild but photographically insane light show to her new tour. So my major challenge is to take photos and/or videos from the audience that are significantly better than average of what's posted on youtube and fan tumbler or twitters.

Fact three. Since I hadn't touched the camera in years I was very shaking about all the menu options. screen icons and buttons combinations.  Playing around with the camera has cleared away some of the fog but I'm still making discoveries--like having histograms and then making them go away with a single button push

Fact four, Last night I was shooting a test movie while playing around with the mike gain. I also snapping a photo or two in the middle of things. And yup, like the manual warned the shutter noise can be loud. To make things mildly realistic, I was filming a utube clip of Lorde singing Heavenly Father on my 1680 x 1050 pixel monitor with the S3IS set at its max vid resolution, 640x480. So we are not talking low noise, high res. To see what I had to work with go to  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8QNjuRHq4k. This was taken somewhere in the section where  the light show turned everything on the stage blue.

Fact five: I fired up my favorite photo editor, RawTherapee, to see what I could do to clean up the photo. End result--maybe not that impressive but Scribble's Scrapbook is a 'what I've been playing around with' blog. For more serious stuff about photograph and RawTherapee head over to my other blog, Scribble's Scribbles.  http://scribble-jpc.blogspot.com/2014/09/this-stage-shot-is-rawtherapee-challange.html