The subplot of the show was Carmen San Diego. The audience, through the MCs, chased her around the world while enjoying performances along the way. Mexico was the first stop.

We were about 10 or 12 rows from the stage. The lighting for these kinds of performances is never good for photography. The lighting is low, artificial, and not flash based. Also, my camera doesn’t have much of a zoom lens so I wasn’t expecting great results. I tried lots of different camera settings on my Panasonic DMC-LX3 as an experiment. I used IA (automatic adjustment by the camera’s software), night portrait, night scenery, party, candle light, and high sensitivity modes. The only mode that turned out presentable images was IA.

Posted on May 10th, 2009 under people. Tags: international show, lx3, people, Southern Oregon University. Comments: 2

Every year the International Students Association at Southern Oregon University in Ashland puts on a show. The performances are always top notch, the crowd is crazy loud, and people are turned away at the door because the demand for seats (all free) is so high. This was actually the first year I made it in since four years ago. The prior two years we didn’t get to the Music Recital Hall early enough to get one of the 440 seats. This year one of my students made sure we got in. (Thanks Ixel!)

For the next week I’ll show you some photos from the event.

After being welcomed to the show by about a dozen students in a dozen different languages, the first performance was a Native American drum circle, occasionally flanked by dozens of international students in their home country’s traditional dress.

Posted on May 9th, 2009 under only in ashland, people. Tags: international show, people, Southern Oregon University. Comments Off on SOU’s International Show Week (1 of 7)

This is the video I took of Hanneke Cassel with my LX3 a while back. The quality was much better before Youtube crunched it.

Posted on March 29th, 2009 under people. Tags: people, video. Comments: 1

Snowmobiling at Thousand Springs (near Crater Lake)…

Posted on March 22nd, 2009 under people, places. Tags: people, snow, winter. Comments: 1

Continuing from yesterday’s blog entry showing the Science Fair night at the elementary school, today’s photo is of one of the more popular Science Fair projects of the evening–the mini volcano. The volcano erupted again and again during the evening to the delight of everyone.

My daughter did an egg-getting-sucked-through-a-bottle experiment. We brought the laptop and had a little multimedia slideshow looping the following:

Egg sucked through a bottle

Posted on March 15th, 2009 under people. Tags: people. Comments: 3

Posted on March 14th, 2009 under people, places. Tags: people. Comments: 3

Friday night we went to see Hanneke Cassel (center) at the Unitarian Fellowship. It was the first time I’d been back inside that church since we stopped attending maybe 6 or 7 years ago. The show was great, really amazing at times. On the cello was Ariel Friedman and on guitar was Keith Murphy.

One of the reasons I’m sharing this photo though is to show off the low-light capabilities of the LX3. The lighting was absolutely awful for picture taking purposes, and I wasn’t going to use a flash. I was several rows back, too, so I had the camera on 3.6X zoom. In addition, the subjects were moving, and the picture still came out pretty decent. No other camera I have owned would have done nearly as nice a job.

I have some good video with the LX3 from this event too. Perhaps I’ll show that to you in a later entry.

Posted on March 8th, 2009 under people. Tags: lx3, music, people. Comments: 3

Thanks to the recession and budget cuts, this is the final year for 5th Grade Orchestra. The venue for tonight’s concert was the Ashland Middle School Gym. The wall in the back looks like the Ashland High School Gym because the high school is temporarily using it while their gym is rebuilt.

Posted on February 24th, 2009 under people, places. Tags: people. Comments: 2

To break up all of the snowy pictures of the past little while I dug in the archives for this photograph from two summers ago when I captured my daughter’s first soccer goal. This soccer field is behind Ashland Middle School.

Posted on February 16th, 2009 under people, places. Tags: ellie, people, soccer, sports, summer. Comments Off on My daughter’s first goal