Rock and Roll and Film and Iron

A few months ago, my husband and I found out that one of our favorite bands was playing with another one of our favorite bands along with another one of our favorite bands who I’d never gotten to see live before…in Birmingham, Alabama. So what would a normal, responsible adult couple do? Yes, fly from Washington DC to Birmingham for about 48 hours.

While there, we met up with some friends who took us for a walk around the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. Once a pig iron blast furnace, after closing it was preserved and restored and is now a museum, center for metal arts, and concert venue. It’s a beautiful site to wander around on a grey, drizzly day.

I’m sure we’ll be back at some point to actually explore more of what the city has to offer, eat more biscuits, and take more photos. (Oh, and the show was amazing.)

National Cathedral: Space, Light & Sound event

Artomatic was amazing, as always. Met some great artists, saw some really original pieces, and learned a lot about presenting my work and even (yikes!) networking and talking to people about photography. Now that I'm back to real life, I'm going to get back to the scanning mines. These are from the Washington National Cathedral's February program called "Seeing Deeper." For one night they removed all the chairs and lit up the Gothic interior with colored, changing lights. I read up on low-light photography before I went, but I was mostly just winging it. The only shots that came out were from my Diana+, which I used with a long exposure trigger and a light tripod. I tried metering with an iPhone app, but with the lights changing and the stark contrasts I was mostly left to guessing. Even with high-speed film and shooting on the longest exposure, nothing came out from my Pentax; I'm guessing I should have used the "bulb" exposure and held it open as long as I did for these - about 5 to 7 seconds.