More Aussie Floyd (Not Uncle)

As I mentioned, I saw The Australian Pink Floyd Saturday night in Atlanta. They played at the Fox Theatre, a great venue right in downtown Atlanta. This was the same theater that saw the premier of Gone With The Wind way back in 1939. We had visited the box office earlier in the day to find out if I could bring my camera in or not. Turns out that they permitted cameras, but only point-and-shoots and cell phones. So my big SLR was out. I borrowed a friend's camera, and spent about 30 minutes trying to learn how to operate it in the dark. I was still finding my way around it when we arrived. My first shot was the marquee out front, where I had to block traffic for ten minutes waiting for the coming attractions to loop back around to the faux Floyd.

Once inside, this was what we saw. I spent some more time trying to make adjustments to the camera, finally settling on a maximum aperture of f2.8 (depending on the focal length) and an exposure time of 1/30 to 1/60 of a second, depending on what lights were lit on stage. The ISO was set to 400, so if you look close you'll see quite a bit of grain in these shots, especially the ones I've cropped a lot. But they are still pretty good for shooting in the dark.

The concert began with a complete performance of Wish You Were Here. Not just the song, but the whole LP. They didn't hold anything back, throwing themselves into the performance right off. If you've ever seen the real Pink Floyd, you'll recognize many of the visuals. Even the stage state mirrors the real Floyd. The round rear-projection screen is vintage Floyd. The pyramids are a typical motif, as is the diver below in Mono Lake. Very impressive.