Continuing Floater week, here are some more photos from the May 20, 2011 show at the Rogue Theatre in Grants Pass, Oregon.
David Amador is the Floater guitarist.
Another picture of Rob Wynia…
Today’s video is of the song “Cinema” from the Glyph CD, Floater’s 2nd CD released back in 1995. The audio is really bad at times although things sounded great in my ears. I had ear plugs in which usually fix some indoor concert noise. My camera didn’t have the earplug luxury. Still, I wonder if the recorded sound would have come out cleaner had I been near the mixing board.
Last night Eric (pictured above) and I headed up to Grants Pass to see Floater for something like the sixth time. I brought along my Nikon D7000 to practice shooting concerts with before the festivals this summer for which I will likely have a press pass (Roskilde in Denmark and Getaway in Sweden). I didn’t really expect them to let me in with it, but they said nothing.
I’ll post a couple dozen photos and some videos from the show over the next week.
Robert Wynia on bass and vocals
Pete Cornett on drums and backing vocals
The Rogue Theatre’s poor lighting didn’t make photography easy. I tried a half dozen different settings and never really found anything that worked great in low light. Most of the shots that came out OK were on the rare occasions when the lighting got almost half-way decent for a moment.
The D7000 video capabilities aren’t too amazing in low light, or I didn’t have the settings right. Anyone know good settings for recording video at a concert on the D7000? I should have filmed the videos by the sound board for higher quality audio. Lesson learned.
Last night Robert Wynia of Floater put on an absolutely magical performance (for me anyway) at Johnny B’s in Medford. He performed at the same place back in March.
This time I was familiar with his new CD, Iron By Water. I don’t know if the familiarity with the new material was it, or if there was just some pixie dust in the air, but I was spellbound.
I decided to try out my son’s Panasonic HDC-SDX1 (1080p HD Camcorder). While it was easy to use, lightweight, and I had a perfect view of the entire performance (recording over a dozen songs and only skipping three from the entire set), the results aren’t what I was expecting. Things looked great in the viewfinder and the sound was good at the venue, but the videos aren’t very clear and the sound is not always good. I’m disappointed as I thought the camcorder would do much better than my TZ10, which is what I used last time in similar conditions. It turns out the TZ10 can take better video, at least in a poor lighting environment.
Floater returns to the Rogue Valley next Friday night. They are playing in Grants Pass. Perhaps I’ll try my Nikon D7000 then and see if I don’t have better luck.
Since the quality isn’t where it should be, I’ll post just one of the videos. You can find the rest on youtube. This is “Cast Aside” off the new solo CD. It reminds me somewhat of Pink Floyd.
Each year, near the end of the international show, the students do an international fashion show. My-Linh, above, is from Vietnam.
Not all of the students represent their home country though. Ashley, on the right, was representing Thailand even though she is from Oregon.
Erina is Japanese, but she was part of the Mexico group.
The hosts of the fashion show portion were from France and Japan. That’s another student, Yuki, from Waseda University.
Earlier in the evening, many of the Japanese students (and some non-Japanese students) performed a medley of Japanese Anime songs including Miyazaki classics like Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫) and My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ).
The autofocus (AF) on the Nikon D7000 in video mode has two major problems for which there is no fix. First, it isn’t smooth or quick as you’ll see in the video below. The second problem is the audible noise it makes. The video quality can be outstanding at times, but unless your target is not moving you will have problems with the autofocus. Actually, I took the camera out for more video tests today and found that even with a non-moving target the camera would sometimes try to refocus causing temporary blurs and the noise once again. Basically you can only use the autofocus if you are going to edit out all of the portions of your video when the camera is focusing. For future video on the D7000 I will have to only use manual focus, which means the quality probably won’t be outstanding. I’m very disappointed in this aspect of the camera.
The following video is of the Indian stick dance (Dandiya Raas). Many of the participants were not from India, but they looked great anyway.
Before they finished I was so frustrated with the autofocus problems in video mode that I just started taking still photos instead.
And the rest of the videos I took from Floater’s bassist’s great show…
This last song really surprised me. I didn’t realize Rob was doing covers of “The Final Cut” or I wouldn’t have missed the first part of it. I’m a huge Roger Waters fan and “The Final Cut” is more Roger Waters than Pink Floyd.
Pete, Floater’s drummer, opened up for Rob. Imagine if you will back to the late 1970s when the members of Kiss all made their solo albums. I’m not a Kiss fan so I don’t know anything about those records but I’m guessing all of the band members did not move to the guitar on them. I’m guessing Gene still played the bass, Peter played drums, etc. Maybe I’m wrong. The members of Floater, on the other hand, all play guitar on their solo albums. Pete opened for Rob playing nothing but guitar. Rob, who is Floater’s bassist, played only guitar as well. Maybe this only strikes me as interesting.
Anyway, Pete’s CD goes by the name Riverboat I believe. I couldn’t find it on amazon.
I’ll leave you with another song from Rob’s set (with Pete on drums). This is a song called “Come to Me” off Rob’s new CD. He tells a little story about it before playing.
Last night a friend and I headed to Medford to watch Rob Wynia on his solo, acoustic tour in support of his new CD, Iron by Water. The Floater front man did not disappoint. Actually, 2/3 of Floater played on this evening. Peter Cornett was on drums.
Here is a video I took of one of the Floater songs they performed, “Cannonball” off of Wake. Enjoy!
Today’s entry would have been far more timely had I done it several days ago when Oregon Ducks’ fever was at an all-time high. Alas, I forgot about the photo I had of the Oregon Ducks’ Voodoo donut. After the loss to Auburn, everyone’s Duck gear seems to have disappeared.
You can see the green and yellow Ducks donut in the above photo in the back on the right. I took this photo in Eugene on the day after Thanksgiving. The Ducks were hosting Arizona that night. Since the holidays were approaching, you can see they were working on some Christmas-themed donuts. To make things look non-biased from a religious perspective, they also tossed in a Jewish one it seems.
ESPN has done some “special” game day Voodoo doughnuts made for them when they were in town.
Today’s video is of the end of “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” (complete with helicopter beginning at 2:06) and the very beginning of one of Pink Floyd’s more famous tunes. You’ll get to see the appearance of the “schoolmaster” near the end. He was one of several puppets employed during the show. You can see another one in the “Mother” video.
