Swan Dance in Australia - Lumix Life

My "Swan Dance" gallery was shown in a photography gallery in Sydney, Australia as part of Panasonic's Lumix Life exhibition. Here are some screen shots from a webcam set up in the gallery, along with the original photos.







You can see art works made from my swan photos at: Swan Art

Twins in Light: Wooden Tops

These wooden tops were made by Alan Gray, a mechanical engineer, who enjoys making toys that balance. The package they came in arrived on a sunny spring day. When I opened the box the sunlight from outside my front door and window made a nice glow on the red tissue paper and the colored top. So I took a picture.

The top maker's website is at: Wood Tops

Norman Petty Documentary featuring Buddy Holly

Five photographs I took inside the Norman Petty recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico were used in a documentary called "New Mexico Legends - The Norman Petty Studios." The documentary was produced by the New Mexico Music Commission and you & me productions. It first aired on New Mexico PBS stations on June 4, 2009. It features Buddy Holly, the Fireballs, LeAnn Rimes and others.


Here are the photographs of mine that were used:

• Ampex Tape Recorder - Maybe Baby


• Celeste Used by Vi Petty on Buddy Holly's "Everyday"


• Nor-Va-Jak Microphone


• Acetate Cutter


• Baldwin Piano

Thanks to Steve Palmisano of you & me productions

Fujifilm Instax 200 Camera Photographs

Instax is instant film like Polaroid used to make. I recently bought a Fujifilm Instax 200 camera. It's a large plastic camera about 7" long and 5" high. It has three exposure settings (lighten, normal and darken) and two lens settings (0.9 to 3 meters and 3 meters to infinity). I'm having fun playing around with it. Here are two of the first photographs I took with my Instax camera.

Wheat Sky

Snowless Winter

Tegan's Fingers and the Art of Cropping

When taking pictures I usually try to get the shot I want without thinking about later adjustments or cropping. In the digital world we live in it's easy to take a photograph and possibly improve on it with Photoshop and other programs. But I live in the natural world too and I prefer to just leave things alone. Of course my Nikon D80 is a digital thing, but really all it does it capture light on a sensor according to the way I set the camera. I would prefer that it capture the light as naturally as possible. And this approach also includes the composition of the picture. This feels natural to me, whether it really is or not.

At the Tegan and Sara show I saw in Aspen in April, I wasn't able to get close enough to the stage to get the shots I really wanted. And there were a lot of people between me and the band. So I later spent some time cropping the photographs to get better views. This has helped me to see into the pictures more and I found some interesting details.

I cropped one to show this close-up of Tegan's guitar. It's not really a great picture -- it's a bit too blurry maybe -- but I like the way the guitar strings seem to vibrate under Tegan's fingers. This is something you really don't notice when looking at the entire photograph.

Here is the original photograph before cropping. You can click on either one to see a larger view.

Another crop from the same original is at Flickr here: Tegan Quin of Tegan and Sara on Flickr.

Recently I watched the Beatles 1965 movie Help, which has a number of scenes showing the Beatles miming to various songs. These sequences influenced later music promo films, especially MTV video clips. Some of them include close-up shots of the Beatles playing their instruments, showing fingers on strings. I guess this could be called "finger syncing." As a non-musician I've often been fascinated watching musicians play their instruments, especially with the way their fingers touch guitar strings or the keys of a saxophone or piano, or hold drumsticks. I tried to capture that idea here. In a natural yet digital kind of way...

Tegan and Sara - Belly Up, Aspen

Tegan and Sara played at Belly Up Aspen in Colorado on April 30, 2008. It was off-season in Aspen, the period between the end of the ski season and summer, so the town was quiet. But the club was filled with a boisterous crowd of Tegan and Sara fans, including many who had driven from Denver. I was able to take a few photos with my Nikon D80 from the crush of crazy fans on the dance floor in front of the stage. All four of these were cropped in camera. The camera was set on manual (f1.4, 1/60 shutter speed). I used a Nikkor 85mm f1.4 lens with no flash.

Sara Quin

Tegan and Sara

Tegan Quin

Sara Quin

In the eighties I photographed Wednesday Week at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, California. The two Belly Up clubs are separately owned by a pair of brothers.

More Tegan and Sara at: Tegan and Sara Photographs by Joe Beine