I got a last-minute ticket to see Sheryl Crow at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston on July 30. It was too late to get a photo pass and so I brought my new Canon G9 point-and-shoot. Although it turns out that some people brought their giant DSLRs and I probably could have too. Among others, there was a woman behind me with at least a 300mm lens and nobody told her to stop photographing.

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The pictures didn’t come out too badly, especially for being at least 50 rows back, but of course this set is more “artsy” than a regular concert shoot. I had to zoom way in and keep most images fairly small to avoid a preponderance of noise, and use a bit of Photoshop on others to disguise the noise or, in some cases, highlight it. I actually am fond of a little noise sometimes. And I love using Photoshop anyway to change a standard image. Since with “good” noise-free images it seems a waste to use a lot of Photoshop on them, I try to save that for the sets that “need” it. Personally I like a mix of regular shots and the artsy stuff but some people have a disdain for the latter. Well don’t look then!

Supporting Sheryl were James Blunt (there are a few pictures of him in the gallery) and another band, a reggae outfit whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch, nor did I get any pictures of them. James was also quite good and caused a big hullabaloo when he ran into the audience. And I do mean he ran INTO the audience. He wove throughout rows and aisles almost all the way to the back, where I was sitting.

Sheryl put on a wonderful show. I’d never seen her live before. She moves around a lot and changes guitars a lot, which from a photographer’s viewpoint makes for good pictures. Plus she’s drop-dead gorgeous, which don’t hurt none. The whole place was standing, dancing, singing, and at times laughing, like when she introduced a song from the new album saying something like “this is a song about why some people become famous for doing nothing important and being nothing remarkable and how ridiculous this is. And oh um ‘Paris Hilton.’” The whole place cracked up over that.

All pictures taken with a Canon G9. I shoot in RAW and used the optical zoom for most of the shots. Although the G9 will extend the zoom in JPEG, it cannot do so in RAW. This seems to be typical for cameras that shoot in both RAW and JPEG (my Panasonic Lumix does the same thing). I did do a few in JPEG to try it out and those are the shots that are bigger. But still, shooting from very far back is what it is. Lots of heads in front of you and it’s pretty dark. Actually a lot of shots came out with Sheryl very overexposed. She was often in a very bright light as compared to the rest of the band and although I was using spot metering, her face still was far too blown out. In any case, it was the first time I used that camera and mostly a learning experience and practice session. If I had been even 20 rows closer, I think I would have had many more keepers. Still, not bad for back of the venue, no flash, only 6x zoom, and not having the manual memorized yet!

I’ve just noticed that Simpleviewer was resizing the pictures in a way I didn’t like but I can’t seem to get it to work completely. The horizontal pictures are okay but the vertical ones are being resized smaller, which is unfortunate because some of those are the ones that came out more clearly than the horizontal ones. Shall have to work on this later.