Jazz and Hip Hop!!

New Camera?
Back in November 2009 I had decided to take a big leap in camera gear and upgrade my Canon 450d to a shiny new Canon 7D (gulp!).  Could I handle this beast?…er…well I did not have time to think about it

In at the deep end!
I was going along to support my younger brother for a Jazz Hip Hop project he was working on…and I had barely got the 7D out of the box and he asked if I could take photos of the night. How could I say no? Bugger, I had not even read the instruction manual.  Not only that, I didn’t have a kit lens as I only bought the 7D body hoping to save pennies for buying a lens later. So I went armed only with my Canon 50mm f1.4l lens as I knew it would be dark in there (eep!)…

Rebirth of the Cool

About the project…”In the autumn of 2009, RollingSound & Trinity College of Music, with the help of a generous grant from the Arts Council, created a band out of some of the finest young Jazz and Hip Hop musicians in London.  Trinity supplied the Jazz musicians, whilst the Hip Hop musicians were selected at auditions held at the British Music Experience at the 02. Over three months, the band worked with our three tutors above to create music and documentary videos exploring Jazz and Hip Hop, which have now been collected together on this website for others to benefit from. The band performed their work to a packed audience at Blackheath Halls in Nov 09 as part of the London Jazz Festival”

The tutors, or guides, were: my brother Eric Lau, Finn Peters, and Ty

Backstage

Cool, as Eric’s sister I got to hang out backstage. That’s as far as my coolness goes, I’m really the embarrassing sister who is very proud of my younger brother and I try very hard not to shout ‘that’s my brother’ when he’s on stage and/or with his peers

The students were lovely and it’s obvious that a lot of hard work had been put into this project.  They had become a close knit team over the 3 months of intense work.  The talent in the room was phenomenal and I was proud to see that UK does have something to look forward to musically (if given the chance!).  So watching them - I only can do the best myself and hope the camera doesn’t not fail me now! ….Right how do you turn the camera on?!

Result!
Okay, so I realised that after the first act, that I had just been taking photos of the Trinity students who had nothing to do with the project at all (doh!). No-one told me, I thought it was weird - I was the only person to be taking pictures. But hey ho, they were awesome especially guy on the trumpet.
 

YouTube Montage!
Job done, phew! After about 300 shots later on the ‘right’ act (yes that is the average I take on an event if not more) I have found the 7D auto ISO to be awesome! Especially in this low light.  It would have been difficult with the 450d (sorry I do miss you 450d, we had some good times).  It took me awhile to get used to the controls, but I think I stuck mainly to aperture setting f1.4 whilst I played around with just the ISO.

The only thing I was gutted about was the focal length as I could not get in close enough and I could not stand in front of the band as there was a camera rig set up and I would have been in front of the audience causing a nuisance. So all the shots are taken from the right or left of stage.  There was also a jib on the left hand side (basically a big mechanic arm with a camera on the end) so had to avoid getting knocked out by that too!

I provided the pictures to Rolling Sound and they were pretty chuffed with the result. They also put together my photos on YouTube as a montage with one of the tracks the students had recorded. (awesome!) It was a track they had performed that night and is their interpretation of J Dilla’s song Fall in Love.  I love this version! (double awesome!)
Enjoy!!