Concert of Praise, 2008

Every year, our church has what they call a Concert of Praise. It’s an evening service held with all of the Hill Country Bible Churches in the association. This year, there were so many churches (due to church planting!) that the concert had to be split between “East side – West side” with two concerts occurring simultaneously. It was pretty amazing. Over 5,000 decisions for Christ were made in the last few months as a result of the Backyard Bible clubs, GO Trips, and various other ministry efforts. What a joyous occasion to celebrate!

I do feel like I completely missed it, though. I mean, I was there and all… but I had two DSLRs (with different lenses, so I didn’t have to switch lenses in the dark) between me and the “action” and I was continually looking for good angles and “the next shot.” This was my first time shooting dark stage shots without the calming prescence of my brother and I was praying that I’d get an acceptable number of photos for the Worship Team. I’d done the sermon shots on August 3rd… but the house lights were up for those.

Not a good pic at all (bad point of view) but here’s Dave. He was “working,” too, see?

James was there. He sat in the audience and reports from the parents I had him sitting with were very good. We have a very well behaved 3 year old, apparently. Go James! Woo!

Here are some of my favorites from Sunday night:

That one with the balloons waaaaay up high, in the upper left hand corner is my favorite. I just love the foreshadowing!

I shot with my brother’s Canon 400D and my Canon 300D. I had the XTi set to save in RAW mode and the 300D to save in jpg mode (because I have lost my other 2Gig memory card) and I have to say… … … …I was blown away with the jpgs that came off of the 300D. I was so blown away with them that I didn’t even bother opening them in CS3. The thing that amazes me is that you probably can’t tell which ones were the unprocessed jpgs off of the 300D or the processed ones off the 400D unless you knew which lenses I had on which camera. Heh.

Music!

Here are some pictures of the jazz trio that was playing. I’m gonna tell Tom (the one on sax) that he needs a website so I can link to him. He can be reached via email at justforyoujazz at yahoo.com if you’re in need of some music. Their music added the perfect touch to the evening at the Art Exhibit.

These were fun shots to get. They were set up in the darkest, hardest to reach corner where the walls were painted this mossy green (ick for bounce flash) and the perfect angle was occupied by the support beam for the staircase… I tried the tripod but the exposure times were too long to be sharp, I tried bouncing the flash off the ceiling by just standing there but the reflection in the window behind them was quite evil and the musicians were still severely underexposed. Eventually what worked is boosting the flash up to +3 and standing on the top of a barstool with the flash bounced off the ceiling and the sliver of tan wall. I may have looked silly but the pictures are acceptable!

I’ll update soon with pictures of the art and event.