on lenses and guitars

my good friend Shannon Rosan turned me on to this great site, www.lensrentals.com, when i told her i was ready to buy a lens, but wasn't sure what to get...

what a wonderful company! having worked in customer service, i can spot GOOD service a mile away, and this company just reeks of it. with myriads of lenses and camera bodies available, and optional insurance, it's a great way to test mid-to-high priced lenses before you buy, or temporarily upgrade your gear before a big weekend of shooting. I was extremely pleased.

pleased enough to make a plug for them in my blog!

still, i'm sure people are more interested in what i rented.

I rented Canon's 85mm 1.8, and 100mm 2.8 macro (without IS). Two very very nice lenses...

And the verdict?

The 85mm is lovely, with perfect proportions and extremely easy to use. The 100mm is equally lovely, a bit heftier and tricker, but with the macro capabilities... it's gonna edge out the 85mm. For me, the 85mm was just too similar to my 50mm, and if i'm gonna spend a chunk of money (ugh; thank goodness for business write-offs), I want something "different."

I got to test these at a couple of shows - great live, low-light, tricky environments. These aren't award-winners, but i was pleased with the results!


with the 85mm: Mike P, of KWMP


with the 100mm: Jimmy G, of the Jimmy Grant Quartet

night of the band

thanks to my lovely new flash (a Speedlite 270) and good ol' Photoshop (i kept it "imperfect" on purpose), here are the gents of Cold Blue Mountain, performing at a metal show in a downtown gallery:

(full view, please!)

breakfast

i put half and half in my cold cereal.

infuriating... not so much!

What really happened was, the gentlemen of Cold Blue Mountain only had 20 minutes yesterday evening (around 9:00 p.m., so it may as well have been the dead of night) to get some shots for an imminent press piece. Whoops, night shooting? Okay... Derec and i scouted a couple of sites that would have worked great [in daylight] before happening on one of those "oh of COURSE!" locations that's right in front of the proverbial nose and lit up like a walmart parking lot.

Derec, lead shooter and art director, made a good point about the importance of location for a band like CBM. They're an instrumental metal ("instrumetal," so i coined) band, and aren't grungy enough for a graffiti-covered warehouse, but not indie enough for a field of wheat. So you can imagine our complete satisfaction with this sterile, corrugated metal industrial plant right off a main street in town. Cars driving by were honking at us like we were rock stars - oh wait... we were!