One A Day – 914 – Amati 5th Anniversary
Calm, Cool
The boys are back – Los Teddy Boppers!
Timeless
Stand Up
Slap that Bass
Right down to his shoes
It’s Complicated
Boppin!
Big Man, Big Hair
Smooth
Classic
Lady Sax
Slip-Sliding 1
Slip-Sliding 2
Shine
The Gang
- AMATI 5to aniversario! – con Los Teddy Boppers de CDMX
- Salón Jardín Quinta Yucanpil
- Morelia, Michoacán, México
- December 3, 2016
- Copyright, all rights reserved
Los Teddy Boppers is a popular group out of Mexico City that we’ve had the pleasure of listening to before at Amati and were glad to have back. They play classic rockabilly and as you can see from the photos, they dress and act the part. They wouldn’t be out of place in a 1950’s club, but they aren’t just acting – they are very much in the genre and a lot of fun.
To go with that idea, most of these photos are styled to look like black & white photos from the era. In the 60’s I shot black & white TriX – 4×5 sheet and 120 roll, so I know first hand how it looked. At the time I adapted a technique with a film developer called Ethol UFG that allowed me to push TriX from an ASA of 400 to an almost unheard of 3200. That enabled a lot of shots I couldn’t take otherwise – with or without flash. Now, with digital instead of film, I shoot in low light at an ISO of 6400 and with a little smoothing I have very little grain and good tonal density. In truth, these photos would only look like this if they were shot with a 4×5 sheet – the grain would be very evident in 12o roll size and quite strong in 35mm. All the black & whites in this series have a blue overlay except for Lady Sax. I left it off in that case to show the difference. I like the blue cast because it emulates the cold glossy papers often used for printing classic journalistic black & white.
“Shine” – the last photo of the Teddy Boppers is one of my current tone-mapped works. I like how it came out in this case a lot. Punchy, strong color, and those shiny highlights. For me it works.
The last photo is a real gift. It was taken in low light with an on camera flash (as were all of photos in this series). The shutter speed was 1/8 of a second at f/5.6 – very low light. I left the shutter speed where it was and let the flash capture the right balance of on camera and natural light. After a little balancing in Lightroom I got what I consider to be a very natural capture of some great friends. It also helped that this one was taken with my 50mm – which remains my best and least expensive lens. If you have an APS-C or similar size sensor in your camera as I do, a standard 50mm can be a very nice addition to your kit.
That’s all from this party but tonight I’m going to another concert, it is Friday afterall, and we will see what we find…