Josh Bradley Photography

Well,  long time no blog, right?  Well it as always has been a touch crazy around here for various reasons, but suffice to say sleep has not been occurring as of late.  So it has been a while since a blog post has been updated and now, here is one for all the faithful readers who still check this site, even when there has been nothing posted for almost a month now.

So why the title “Got the Blues”, well it is because I just got back from Photoshop World and I already miss it like crazy, plus I got to photograph Big Electric Cat at the House of Blues again and it was amazing!!!!!!!

It was a great time at PSW and I can only say this,  ”If you have never been, kick yourself NOW!”  Not really, but I have to tell you the amazing amount of talent that is provided by the instructors at PSW is staggering.  There is pretty much something for everyone at this event, and every year it just gets better and better.  I got to sit in on a lot more classes this time, and I learned so much so fast my brain was getting ready to explode.  I sat in on Chris Orwig’s classes on Lightroom to better understand the basics,  I dropped in on RC Concepcion’s class on the Top 10 Things to Know in Photoshop, and the list goes on and on.

One class I deeply regret missing was Alan Hess’s class on photographing concerts which was co-instructed with Scott Diussa.  I heard it was off the hook.  So much so that a neighboring convention in the building came over to ask them to turn it down.  But even though I didn’t make it to the class I tried my best as always to get some great shots of the band while they were bringing down the house.

So believe it or not I have some educational content at this point, more of an observation than educational,  but you may find it useful.  I shot this with my Canon setup (1D Mark IIN 16-35f2.8 II).  Now the last couple of years I have been using Nikons to shoot the event, because my Canon just gave me way to much noise at the ISOs needed to freeze the action.  But this time around I thought I would try something I had not done before and that was to use the in-camera noise reduction option.

Now as you may know, this does slow down the write time to the card.  Usually it is a 1:1 ratio (however long the exposure was is how long the camera needs to process and write the image).  So this posed a challenge for me,  I had to be even more selective of my shooting and not fill the camera’s buffer every time I fired off a burst of shots.  This actually was a good thing for me to do.  I usually come away from photography the concert with anywhere from 10 to 20Gbs of cards filled up.  This time however, I barely filled an 8gig card halfway, and the photographs were better for it.  As well, the sort time was drastically shorter.  Plus the results of the in-camera noise reduction were really nice!!  So all in all it was a good thing all the way around.

So I guess what I am trying to say here is, sometimes stepping out of the norm cam be a good thing.  Slow down and think the shots through more and be patient, your photography will thank you for it.