Jazzy

If it's the Santandrea Jazz Band, the end of summer must be near. This evening their guest was Eric Luter, son of the more famous Claude. As always, the amphitheatre was packed with a happy audience, and the show went on and on, until midnight struck. Hence the backblip.

As you may have noticed, I have been taking a few photos of bands recently, so I decided to experiment with different ways of doing it. This is a fairly classic shot, but I also experimented with DOF, here and here. S considered that these experiments were not a success -- what do you think? The complete selected Flickr set (8 photos) is here.

Earlier in the day we had the judging of the photo competition I organised in lieu of the usual journée des peintres, which didn't happen this year. We had 21 entries, which wasn't bad for a first attempt, which was a last-minute addition to the programme. There was no imposed theme because I wanted to encourage as much participation as possible -- I'd been hoping for a bit of variety, but nearly everyone did landscapes, and of those approximately 80% were of, or taken from, Alaric. S and I spent half of the day framing and hanging the entries. It was judged by vote of the public, which does give a slightly unfair advantage to people with lots of friends, but the two prizewinners were both among the better photos, so the result was fine with me -- even if my favourite photo didn't win. I had to present the prizes and give a speech -- eek! -- but I made it short and sweet, and then dived for the aperitifs without which no village event is complete. I had an interesting chat with the winner, who is a keen photographer with experience of competitions, so I have a few changes in mind if we do it again next year.