I Feel Numb

Saturday the 19th was a very rough day. Some personal stuff happened and I had to leave hanging out with my little sister to go to Talent Farm for a show. First off, I biked from Ikea there in an hour, leaving me exhausted, just to find out that they pushed the show back another half hour.

So I'm tired, pissed off, and personal stuff. And then Sydney E shows up and asks if I'm taking pictures for the bands. I am, so she talks to her band mate and agrees that they might be up to paying me for their set.

The first band to legitimately agree to pay me for a show. I paid close attention to them and tried to get as many shots as I could.

Then some more personal stuff walked through the door and tap me on the shoulder.

The three of the other bands I have listened to before -King Rooster, Enrique's Revenge, and Reverie- and I knew they weren't planning on paying me for my photos. So this gave me the perfect opportunity to mess around and get really creative.

• Use my telephoto add-on lens with my 18-70 lens instead of just the 50mm. If used one way, it created a gentle vignette effect, which was pretty fun on the spot. But if used another way, and probably with a large file instead of medium, it would create a fish-eye effect. I have always liked how fish-eye photos come out, thinking they could lead to some pretty interesting portraits and proportion-play, but not enough to ever want to invest in a fish-eye lens. But now I have the DIY version. 
• Slow down my shutter speed and prop myself/camera up against a wall or my knee. When I took the photo, it stayed open for a few seconds, and after it was done processing, I would see a still stage and background, but actually have the motion of the crowd moving. Which would have been perfect for my AP concentration

 I played around with different flash settings which created two very interesting effects.

• One was that with the flashing multi-colored lights in the venue, I would have a "normal" version of someone in their starting position, and then multi-colored lines of the motion they made in the two seconds after. Instead of the blur lines showing where the person was, the lines showed where they were going.
• The second, which I discovered first, was what called "The Ring" effect by a friend of mine on the spot. I never saw the movie, but the best way I could visually describe it is with Back to the Future. When McFly is looking at the photo of him and his family, and they are slowly fading away leaving the background. Thats what I accidentally re-created. If I had to guess what exactly happened, I would have to say that my flash caught what was happening in that second, but things that were moving faster then the bulk slowly faded out because they were too fast. (ex: the legs of my friend Ben as he was swung about by Sam, a big, big man). I plan on re-re-creating the effects of this one in my studio if I can, and if not, at the next small venue show I go to.

After the show was over, the other band I didn't know, They Cage The Animals, came up to me and asked to see my photos I took of their set. I only took 70 photos of them, most of which were too blurry. But they still paid me $20 bucks on the spot for them. They gave me an email, and I ended the night on a high note.

Cut to Sunday night. I'm tired from AIDS Walk, mentally fried for a lot of personal stuff, and just trying to work on my photos from the night before for my Concentration/Personal Portfolio.

That is when my laptop decided to overheat. And crash.

I haven't been able to backup the majority of my personal photos, along with all the work I had done over the break. So I'll just list everything I probably lost for good.

1. Thousands of photos from my Sophmore and Junior years, and a couple hundred from my Senior Year.
2. My essay for the UCF application that I'm only doing to make my sister happy, not actually thinking I'm going to be able to go anyway.
3. My AP Concentration commentary.
4. My personal portfolio. From near a million photos I've taken in my short life, I had narrowed it down to a couple hundred which I was still in the process of narrowing further.
5. A couple hundred studio self-portrait shots I had done to practice different lighting effects.
6. Three AP Concentration pieces that I had been editing in photoshop.
7. The photos of the only two bands willing to actually pay me for my work. I am now going to have to refund TCTA if I am not able to recover the files. 
8. The photos I had set aside to be used for my WISE preview video. 
9. The will to continue AP Art (again) and pursue photography as a career. Just as I start to backup photos I'm getting paid for, my laptop crashes. If that isn't a sign that maybe this isn't for me, I don't know what is.

This morning, I actually had a 5 minute fight with myself as to whether or not I should bother bringing my camera to school.

I did, but only cause I have a reputation to uphold.