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Articles Tagged with: Brooklyn

Replacements Weekend in Brooklyn

Last weekend I took a trip with my daughter to see one of my favorite reunited bands, The Replacements, play at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. It was their first show in NY in 23 years, and it was the 3rd Replacements show I’ve been lucky enough to see since they reunited in Toronto last year. It was also the best one yet, but that might be influenced by all of the friends that were there to witness it with us.

Traveling with my daughter, I didn’t want to impose ourselves on my friends’ couches and spare rooms, so we used airbnb to get a sweet apartment in Brooklyn. Just a block away from McCarrren Park & Pool, we were in a great location for wandering around and checking out the Brooklyn scene.

We took full advantage of the great weather and spent a lot of time walking/shopping/eating in lower Manhattan as well.

We also caught a nice Sunset over NJ from the High Line:

It’s hard not to miss my old stomping grounds when you’re sharing a bottle of wine with friends on a rooftop in Brooklyn while looking at the Manhattan skyline. Good food, good music, and good people. That’s a good life right there…

You can check out the rest of my photos from our weekend trip on this Flickr set.

One last thing – I’ve joined Ello (thanks for the invite Patch Whisky), which is branding itself as the Anti-Facebook – an effort to cure all of the evils of the biggest social network. Check me out here.

The Return of The Archers of Loaf

I’m gonna keep the writing brief on this one, you can read a thorough review of one of the Archers of Loaf reunion shows through yesterday’s post. I can’t top that, so I’m just gonna let the photos do the talking. What I want you to know about these photos is the camera I used to take them all. Before I left for this trip, my father’s day gift was a new camera (which I picked out).

On sale for $379 (normally $499), I couldn’t resist getting the Nikon P7000 as a street/walkaround camera. After using my waterproof Pentax point & shoot camera a lot on my recent vacation because I didn’t want to risk breaking or getting my DSLR stolen while I was riding an ATV through Cozumel, I realized the value in getting a high-end compact camera. That value is the quality of life you can have by not lugging around a bag of camera equipment during casual engagements. While my Pentax is cool – it really is only good in outdoorsy settings where it can take the heat, dust, and water, but can’t do much with low light.

I threw myself into the fire over the weekend with this camera as the Archers of Loaf are easily one of my favorite bands ever, and here I am shooting their long awaited reunion with a camera I’m completely unfamiliar with. Furthermore, I wanted to pay attention to the show, not fiddle with settings.

I had spent a good portion of Saturday figuring out the ins & outs of the P7000, including a walk through Central Park, which will be the subject of a future post. I pushed this little sucker as far as I could to see just what it can do. Sure it’s noisy in a club atmosphere, and yes I missed a lot of great shots due to my own lack of knowledge of the camera’s limitations, but to me that is the fun of it!

One Issue that popped up at the show in Williamsburg (which I didn’t notice until afterwards) was that the blades that cover the lens were sticking because some debris must have gotten into them. From the reviews I’ve read, the P7000 is very susceptible to this. Now that I’ve seen it firsthand, I know to look out for it while I’m using it.

You can see the effect on quite a few of these photos – it’s like a vignetting on only 2 sides. Fortunately for me it didn’t ruin a lot of the shots, although one picture of my friends after Saturday’s show cut everyone’s heads off – it really stings that that shot is ruined.

After that first night, I was aware of the issue and I kept an eye out for it (although it hasn’t happened since). I did manage to get another shot of some of my friends on the second night – this one was taken by the bassist for Risk/Reward, my friend John Houlihan:

I’ll be sure to share more shots and talk more about the new camera in upcoming posts. So far, I’m loving this thing for sure. You can see the rest of my Archers of Loaf photos in this set on Flickr.