22 February 2010
Cymbals Eat Guitars
Cymbals Eat Guitars @ Start the Bus, Bristol (18/02/2010)
Just a quick little post to stick up a photo or two of the undeniably entertaining Cymbals Eat Guitars.
Was a really fun little gig. Pretty brutal on the ears, but with all the smile inducing antics on display I didn’t particularly care. At £2.50 for the night, it’s the only ticket I’ve got recently that can compete with The Antlers on the price to enjoyment ratio front, but it didn’t quite reach the giddy highs of that night for me. Still… fun fun band.
Photography wise the lighting was abysmal, and my position in the crowd was hardly ideal, but as you may notice, I had a new camera and lens combination to deal with whatever was thrown at me. I’ve spent a stupid quantity of money and moved over to a Canon kit; the lack of future potential in Pentax was freaking me out a little. I’m sure I’ll do some sort of camera comparison in an upcoming post. The lens was a borrowed Sigma 30mm f1.4, which I’m currently adoring in a similar way to my previously unbeatable Pentax-M 50mm f1.7: Newsflash – auto focus and metering can actually be useful!
Posted by matt at 23:47
04 February 2010
Ragfest 2010
Ragfest 2010 was the first instance of a hopefully long running student music festival taking place in the University of Bristol student union. I got in to take some photographs courtesy of the wonderful Photosoc.
I spent the evening switching between the two stages and seperately between my film and digitial cameras. Overall I’m reasonably pleased with the results and will undoubtedly slip a couple of shots into the online portfolio I am currently creating.
It really has highlighted however the limitations of my setup. With the low light in one of the rooms, my cameras manual focus (without the wonderful full frame viewfinders of old) and poor high ISO performance gave me little chance of the shots I was really searching for.
Even the shoot and hope technique of hitting the shutter button an overly large number of times wasn’t easy as my camera can really only take a couple of shots before the buffer runs out of space and I have to wait age for it to empty.
You can see an example of what I achieved in low light with the breakdancing shot above which I was vaugly pleased with – but it took a million and one terrible shots to get a shot like that. The black & white was also a necessity in order to mask as much of the noise as possible.
I guess it’s time for a new camera!
Posted by matt at 17:41
25 January 2010
Lens Pornography
I’m a fan of well organised databases of information; having a Flickr standard account was never an option for me, as having a pro account was the only way I could have an infinite number of sets of photos. In my sad geeky nature, I have created an individual set for each item of photography equipment I use. But what to use as the thumbnail shot for such a set? Well a photo of the actual item itself seemed the most logical option to me, so I set about taking photos of all of my equipment.
Now without putting in too much effort I wanted to give these photos are more professional edge; just shoving the photo under a lamp on my desk was hardly going to give the photos any merit in their own right. As such I came up with shooting them as seen in the picture above. Here are some steps to follow:
- Find an area (such as a window sill) that gets lots of good light and has a vertical and horizontal surface so that you can fill the frame with just these two surfaces.
- Sellotape up a few pieces of plain white paper to the background surfaces.
- Shoot some photos with some form of close focusing lens when the light is good.
- Overexpose and set a high contrast to make the lens look great whilst blowing out any detail in the paper.
- Feel satisfied with the result:
Posted by matt at 20:50
01 January 2010
My Favourite Albums, 2000 to 2009.
If there’s one thing that annoys me a little about best of lists its the lack of honesty I sometimes feel they have. People seem to spend too much time trying to represent their tastes fully, or spread the items out across the period of time in question. I am holding no claim that this list in any way encapsulates the best of anything, more just a list of albums that I remember most fondly from the last decade.
The List
In no particular order…
Sigur Rós – ()
I don’t think you could actually win an argument claiming that () is Sigur Rós’ best album, but to me it’s what is most unique and intriguing about the band condensed into it’s purest form. Little of the later pop pretences enter the frame, nor do the presence of any words water down the experience; all of the lyrics are sung in imaginary and syllable limited “Hopelandic”. Devoid of any title for the album itself or the track upon it, whatever you want to call it, this is the album that makes me love Sigur Rós.
The Mountain Goats – All Hail West Texas
Actually quite a recent discovery for me. I’d liked bits here and there for a while, but not intil recently had I discovered the brilliance that streaks through this album from beginning to end. Some people don’t like his voice, some even complain about the tape hiss that runs through every track, but no one can deny it’s all about the lyrics. The best ever death metal band out of Denton describes secondary school musicians with a brilliant accuracy, and Jenny, is a happy, almost whimsical song, and one of the rare occasions where the lyrics capture those feelings perfectly.
I am healthy, I am whole
but I have poor impulse control
and I want to go home
but I am home
Bright Eyes – Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
I’m not quite sure how I managed to listen to this album as much as I did, but it really dominated a sizeable length of time for me. Other Bright Eyes albums came and went (with the notable exception of I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning which competed heavily for this spot), but I’d always come back to this album. I suppose I have to admit that it was the soundtrack to my unrequited love stage of life that every person (well most) must go through. Oh well.
So Michael, please keep the tape rolling
Boys keep strumming those guitars
We need a record of our failures
As we must document our love
Radiohead – Kid A
The most obvious choice on the list. Absence of this album from any applicable “best of…” list would be a complete injustice to the world. A completely eye-opening and mind-expanding experience.
I’m not here
This isn’t happening
Elliott Smith – Figure 8
My two least favourite Elliott Smith albums occurred in this millennia, with all my obvious favourites in the last one, yet I still couldn’t keep him off the list. Sure for Figure 8 he’s scaled everything up, and in the process lost a lot of what I loved, but luckily lots of new things to love appear in the process.
You’ll take advantage til you think you’re being used
Cos’ without an enemy your anger gets confused
The Postal Service – Give Up
Death Cab for Cutie have never done it for me in the same way this oh so briefly lived side project did. I will always dream of the fabled second Postal Service album coming into existence, but at the same time realise that it’s one of those ill-fated things with no chance of meeting the expectations put upon it. Strangely, I’m not sure I understand why I like most of this as much as I do; the electronics are simplistic and almost cheesy at times, and Ben Gibbard’s voice has never done that much to inspire a response in me, but put together with the songs on offer here, it’s a worthy addition to the list.
And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd
Mogwai – Mr. Beast
Less post-rock and more just rock, Mr. Beast made Mogwai a much more accessible act. It’s still beautiful, just a bit well, angrier (in parts).
Los Campesinos! – Hold on Now, Youngster…
Maybe the least obvious item on the list, yet it makes complete sense to me. The twee/punk aesthetic matches perfectly with the catchy tunes and superbly thought out lyrics. It contains a strange mix of songs that hit you as instant classics, and some growers that initially don’t quite seem to hit the mark, but at the end of the day you love every single track on the album.
You should have built have a statue, and so I did of you
And you were ungrateful, and slightly offended at the dimensions of it
You said you looked less like the Venus de Milo, and more like your mother in a straightjacket
Coldplay – Parachutes
Lots and lots of people seem to object to the huge success that Coldplay have achieved, and frankly, I suppose it is a bit of an oversized beast, but Parachutes the album which started the success ball rolling for them, when judged on it’s own merits alone is actually a great piece of work. Maybe, as an album that prodded my music taste in a certain direction for the years that followed, it has an inflated value in my head, but to me it’s much more than just a tribute album to The Bends. The album has this strange, cold melancholy that rules over it from beginning to end. I’m not sure how to describe it more, but it’s that feeling that holds a lot of what I Iove about this album, and is what’s lost in a lot of Coldplay’s following works.
Godspeed You! Black Emporer – Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
A double album of only four tracks sounds like a silly prospect, but each track here is a true feast in itself, and the combination of the four only goes to strengthen what’s on offer. A truly life changing experience it is falling in love with this album, and what it led me on to listen to made it all the more important to me. This is the only album of this list that I have listened to in it’s entirety today, and all I kept thinking was, “oh man, I love this bit”, again and again and again.
Posted by matt at 19:03
29 December 2009
Colour Scheming
Seeing as it’s the holidays, and I’m filling all my time with pointless activities already, I thought I’d beautify my much loved terminal by designing my own colour scheme.
I started by looking for pre-existing schemes, but firstly, they’re not all that easy to find for someone using gnome-terminal as their terminal emulator, and secondly what I did find really didn’t fulfil what I was looking for. Colour schemes in general either seem to be overly contrasty and garish, or so subtle that I think I’d end up holding up colour cards to my screen.
The result
Try it out
Set the following1 in gconf settings at /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default2
background_color #101010101010
pallete #1B1B1B1B1B1B:#BFBF5D5D5454:#73737F7F3232:
#E9E9FFFF7272:#58588282B2B2:#757550507B7B:
#464686869E9E:#D3D3D7D7CFCF:#555557575353:
#73733E3E3939:#9393A6A63131:#EDEDFFFF8B8B:
#72729F9FCFCF:#ADAD7F7FA8A8:#5959ABABC9C9:
#EEEEEEEEECEC
foreground_color #FFFFFFFFFFFF
gconf-editor provides a nice simple GUI with which to do so.
1Note that, I’ve added line breaks to the pallette setting that need to be removed.
2Or of course any other profile so that you don’t have to try it out on your default.
Posted by matt at 12:25
Categories: Photography, Music, lionsmane.co.uk, 3D Modelling, Computing
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