Year-end school concert

At the end of every school year, the Gaisburg Elementary School puts on a concert for the parents. This year there was also a performance by Ms Schmid’s theater club, in which Fynn participated.

Not every school has a music teacher as highly qualified as Mrs. Obst. She leads the choir, the recorder ensemble and the percussion group. Her well-prepared groups, including several duos, played for two hours to a full house. It was very hot that day, but everyone listened patiently through the two halves of the program.

Sometimes the best pictures come from where you least expect them (except in this case, the sun was shining in on this child so perfectly that I couldn’t resist taking a couple of shots of her and her dad).

In the second half, the theater club performed a potpourri of fairly tales, including Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

At the end – as every year, Mrs. Obst told us – there was to be a sing-along, in which she invited the audience to participate.

Photographically speaking, the pictures from this show didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. I thought it would take place in the large church but it was in the neighboring parish hall. I had the wrong lens with me (f2.8/70-200), so I couldn’t get pictures of the entire stage, even though I was standing up on the counter at the back of the hall most of the time. However, the telephoto aspect of the lens did allow for some nice candids of parents and children.

I had my new Sony HVL 58 flash with me and was excited about testing it at long range. Unfortunately, I blasted the light at the stage, producing the main light with the strobe. I should have shot at 1/40 sec. and used the flash to fill in where the ambient light let me down. I’ve tried that out since and will work on it again. I’m not yet quite as capable a “flasher” as my friend Christian, so I get nervous when I set a (new!) flash to manual in a new room. It is always easier to set it at TTL and adjust the power from the camera. I’ve got a way to go before I master artificial light!