Here I go trying this out again.
I have many things on my mind right now. I’m going to Burning Man at the end of the month (holy crap). I’ve made the decision to bring my camera (my Nikon D200 and my Canon P&S as a backup) and really throw myself into photography. I don’t know if I want to go pro, but I do want to be a better brand of hobbyist than I have been thus far.
I’m debating about uploading the photographs I took last night at the Hollywood Bowl. Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic for Ravel’s Bolero. This piece has been one of my favorite classical pieces for many, many years. My friends and I had the $8 cheap nosebleed seats, but you don’t have to go for a good view. You go for the music, and hanging out with your friends, enjoying a warm LA night, and drinking wine.
Dudamel is somewhat of a rock star in classical music circles. He’s a young South American with longish curly brown hair, a boyish smile, and endless energy. He tells stories and jokes with the audience between pieces, but it never comes off as forced. It’s like he’s confiding with the audience.
It was a beautiful night, and hearing Bolero done by Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic was something intensely special. I also got to see an opera performance live for the first time. The lyrics were in Spanish and translated on the big screen, and thus also for the first time I could understand what was being sung. Opera is like a poetic cancel jam, it sometimes just seems like words flung together, but then the meaning hits you and it’s very beautiful. I really liked it.
I want to upload the photos I took, even though there are few considering the seats we had, and it was nearly pitch black by the time we were seated. I also would like to edit them in LightZone, but I do not have that installed on my home machine, and still just in the trial anyway. LightZone isn’t expensive (as image editing software goes), but the amount of things I can do to alter photos with it is incredible. It helps that it runs on Linux. I probably will buy it, but I might wait until the trial runs out.
Compromise – I shall look at how the photos turned out. Maybe they do not need that much post processing.