17 Hippies; twelve of them

They are 17 Hippies, though there were only 12 in Adelaide. These pictures are from a workshop session on the Monday.

Their music is a mixture of folk, pop and many other styles. They did more songs in French than German - apparently actually starting to write songs in German was a bit of a breakthrough for the group. I gather from what I remember of the program, and the English bits on their site, that they set out to make their own 'Berlin style'. During the workshop they tried to explain the importance/improbability of using the German language, but I don't think we really got it. Made me curious though.

Their bandleader talked a bit about the hand signals they use when improvising. They've been playing together for many years and do this pretty effortlessly.

But girl, don't they warn ya

This is for Donna Lee, who commented that the weather always looks perfect in my Womadelaide photos. I assure you, it does rain, but when it does, I don't tend to have the camera out so much. This picture is from last year - I seem to have only briefly mentioned the weather - probably still blissed out by the music at the time.

Holds the world in a paper cup

Prompted by Rhonda, I added a little info to the post below about who is in the photos. I didn't see Asa's own set - and after hearing her do a song during the Gala, I kind of regret that. 17 Hippies were enormously enjoyable and I took tons of photos of them during their workshop. Will post some of those soon.


Meanwhile, some festival atmosphere.

Not so jammy

If I wait any longer in the hope of putting together a comprehensive and coherent Womadelaide 2011 post, I'll never do it. So here is a start. Two pictures from the All Star Gala which is always on the last evening. The first one shows two of the members of 17 Hippies from Berlin.

Unfortunately, it's not the 'All Star Jam' as I habitually think of it - which suggests to me a brilliant, continuous, improvisational set weaving all the different musicians in and out. I want to say that the first year I went it WAS like that - but I may be embellishing. In fact it does involve musicians from two or three different groups performing together, but then generally just bring the singers out one at a time to do one of their usual songs.

The picture below features Nigerian singer Asa.

get lit up by light

I took a lot of photos at Womadelaide. Having just finished my course, I set my camera on manual and went nuts. And because I am pretty inexperienced at exposing manually, it sometimes took a lot of shots before I thought I was getting somewhere. I haven't had a chance to really go through and process those photos yet (work has been eating me alive lately). I will post some eventually, but meanwhile, I thought I would show you some more from the Canberra Show field trip.

These aren't necessarily the best photos I've ever taken (and nor are the Womad ones I suspect) but I am so enjoying learning more, understanding more about what I'm doing, and having more choices to make for each shot.

We were given a number of exercises to do, to demonstrate the course content. It wasn't an exam though - phew! For the final class everyone brought in their printed photos from these exercises and we discussed how they worked and what we could have done differently. It was the most interesting and satisfying class.


These two pictures of the dodgems both show motion blur. The one above is the proper exercise - the moving objects should be blurry and the background sharp. We also had to do fast motion where all detail is captured - this one I posted earlier was an imperfect example - one of the cars is blurry, but all of them were moving fast so it's a partial win!
For the one below, I tried moving the camera with the subject - you can see that the guy in front is, while still blurry, much less so than the rest of the picture (including the background this time).



This one uses a short depth of field. I was also thinking about some of the elements (size, colour, line, tone, direction, shape, texture) and rules (rule of thirds, negative space) of design. Of course rules are made to be broken, but it does help to learn about them first. I love the texture/surface of the stainless steel. There are also repeated shapes - the rectangular sign and the pots of fairy floss - leading the eye into the background.


For these closeups of the inflatable shark I was also looking at the rule of thirds - placing the eye at the intersection of thirds. (The rule of thirds can also mean dividing the image into horizontal or vertical bands - like the red and yellow stripes in the picture at the top of this post.)

In the chaotic environment of the show, these not-quite abstract closeups were kind of refreshing, especially after running around trying to tick a lot of boxes on the worksheet. One of the exercises was a landscape, which I found really challenging. There just seemed to be far too much going on in each shot. I managed to get something to print and show in class, but it really was a mediocre photo.

Something I did this weekend

Went to Womadelaide again! (Creature of habit that I am)

Field trip

The Saturday before last, my photography class took a field trip to the Canberra Show. It was hot and busy and slightly frustrating but did I get some photos that I like (and also some that fulfilled the assignments without being great shots).