Didgeridoo

This young woman is a street performer we encountered a few years ago while strolling along the Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain. Even before I saw her, I knew I was hearing a didgeridoo, which makes a kind of a droning sound.Was she a good didgeridoo player? Perhaps a virtuoso? Frankly, I couldn't tell a good didgeridoo sound from a bad one since we don't have many players in my home town. But I did put a coin in her collection plate. I liked her style. And her big didgeridoo.

05-22-09 Paris Street Performers

By Scott Shephard

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This photo was taken on a "walking tour" of Paris that was part of the last school trip I took with students. We saw various parks and buildings but at one point, while walking through an arcade, we encountered this group of street musicians.

I wanted more than the musicians in the photo and so I walked behind the group and framed the violinist between two of his companions. At the moment I took the photo, the violinist looked my way. This is a brief encounter between me and one of the Earth's 6.7 billion inhabitants frozen in 1/60 of a second.

Canon 5D 1/60s f/4.5 ISO400 50mm

05-11-09 A Blurry Band

By Scott Shephard

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I did a series of photos with this effect for the WHS yearbook a few years ago. There are two special techniques being used. One is called "dragging the shutter." What happens is that if you turn your flash on but manually adjust the shutter speed to a fairly slow speed, you can sometimes get some interest ghosting in the image. You can see that in the green t-shirt in the center of the photo. The other technique is to zoom in on some central subject while you push the exposure button. This creates a natural radial blur in the photo. I took 8 or 10 pictures before I got the effect I wanted.

Canon 5D 1/15s f/3.2 ISO100 75mm