wheew.

i didn't mean to disappear for a week, really. last weekend was totally packed and then the week just got away from me.

so the concert went great. i shot all evening on the stage and around the theatre friday, and then a handful sitting in different areas of the audience during the shows on saturday. (i'm near the top of the "most obnoxious audience member ever" list - right behind the guy who sings along and the gal who loudly unwraps cough drops during every other number.) i walked away with about 8 GB of photos. many were duplicates - in this kind of an environment, where "do-over" isn't an option, i find the most success in making sure i can choose between a handful of photos. i also like having the option of different angles, which is why i shoot multiple shows and change my location in the audience.

enough already, on with the photos. i'm whittling my way through proofing, and i'm still very much ensconced in photos from the first half of the show. the theme was "Songs for the Open Road". the first half was "Americana" (think "Oh Susanna", and even Dixie Chicks), and the second half was "Route 66" (which included a medley from Chicago).

the show opened with a lone cowboy and his harmonica aside a campfire:

and included some square dancing:

and one of the gimmicks they used to set the scene was a bit of a flashback to the 30s and 40s (through the early 60s). not being remotely of that generation, i had to do a little research to fully appreciate these, but the audiences totally ate them up. a company called Burma-Vita manufactured shaving cream, and was made famous by their road-side advertising. short, amusing poems were broken into pieces and placed on highway billboards, spanning several miles.

so to mimick this, the choir used people instead of billboards. during transitions between scenes, a group of people would carry the signs across the stage, one at a time, as if you were driving down a highway passing them. great idea. i knew that photos of each individual person would be rather ineffective, so i arranged them into storyboards. i still feel that some of the effect is lost outside of the context of the live performance, but you get the idea. they're cute:

(click to see full-sized view.)





i'll post more tomorrow. :)