“If you can hang out for a bit, Alissa will be here soon and so everyone can get in the pictures.”

That’s pretty much the first thing Nate Eiesland of Scattered Trees said to me, and the catalyst for how I thoroughly embarrassed myself not once, but twice, with two of the biggest faux pas one can make, and within five minutes of meeting him:  mistaking a woman for a man and not getting the band lineup right.

Not entirely without reason–Alissa Eiesland, normally on vocals and keys, had been delayed in traffic and didn’t make it to the performance at Smith’s Old Bar in Atlanta on 12 August. I had up until then only seen pictures of the band on my iPhone, and without my reading glasses, while stealing quick glances during red lights. So when the curtains opened and I saw Jason Harper in the approximate spot I had seen Alissa, I just thought, “Damn, I have GOT to put a pair of specs in my car.”

Worse than thinking it though, is blurting it out: “Ohhhh, I thought that guy in front TOTALLY didn’t look like his picture.” As the saying goes, hilarity ensued. After the group laugh (in which I wasn’t exactly joining in—being too mortified to do anything except apologize profusely) is when I learned that Alissa and Jason are not, in fact, anything close to resembling twins. With that out of the way, Nate and I talked a little about the music and life on the road while waiting for Alissa to get there.

Scattered Trees hails from Chicago and while lots of bands have a couple of members who are related (Van Halen, Wings, the White Stripes) , or whose members are all related (Jackson 5, the Osmonds), few have two separate sets of related pairs. Nate and Alissa Eiseland are married and Jason and Baron Harper are brothers. Joining them as solo bass player is Ryne Estwing, who if nothing else must be glad he never has to take sides out of familial loyalty.

The band’s first album in 2006, Songs For My Grandfather, was born as a way of Nate dealing with the death of the titular family member, and their latest, Sympathy (released on Roll Call/EMI), from the passing of his father. The band, in fact, had almost split up since their second release (EP Heart of Glass in 2007), but the result of Nate coping with his grief through music brought them back together. Its nine tracks are tributes to someone who is gone backed by clean guitar, mandolin, and keys, with heartfelt at-times almost bare vocals that are personal to the writer and yet feel personal to the listener. Comparisons to Wilco and Elliott Smith are well earned but Scattered Trees is its own. The mournful album opener “Bury the Floors” might lead you to believe this is going to be 33 minutes of being depressed but there are enough upbeat moments in songs like “Four Days Straight” and “Love and Leave” and to balance Sympathy into a fairly well-rounded collection of contemplative, if slightly leaning into sadness, listening.

I mentioned to Nate that the people sitting behind me were talking about how they hadn’t known what to expect when coming out that night. They were at the show because one of their group was a fan but they themselves didn’t know the band at all and basically went because they had nothing else to do and Smith’s in particular is a nice venue to relax and really listen to music, and they were more than pleasantly surprised to discover they enjoyed it so much. Nate broke into a smile and said, “That’s one of the nicest things about touring sometimes in smaller venues, even in the ones that might only get 50 people are in the place:  we get to play for people who don’t really like to go see live music and never would go out to a big show. It’s a way to reach people that is more important than is sometimes realized.”

Scattered Trees starts touring again on September 22 at the Pygmalion Music Festival in Champaign, IL, and finishes on November 5 in San Diego. Schedule and tickets on sale now at http://scatteredtreesmusic.com/tour/.

Free download of Four Days Straight.

Sympathy physical album/digital download/bonus tracks/video $14.95; download only/video/bonus tracks $9.99.

Sympathy on iTunes: digital download + bonus remix tracks.

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Outtake: I converted these B&W shots using Topaz Labs new plug-in. It does a pretty nice job so far. I usually use Nik for B&W conversions but Topaz is only $30 until 9/18 (normally $59.99) so I wanted to try it out.

Outtake:

Outtake:

Final selection (same as main post image), in B&W:

This show was incredible. Amazing show, by two shockingly talented people–I don’t think the aligning of their stars together is quite as obvious until you see them together live–and can I just say I love them for their open-camera policy and that I was able to shoot the whole show from the pit and anywhere in the venue.

The Dresden Dolls are continuing this tour until December 31. Download their music on Bandcamp and you’ll know the money is going directly to the band.

This is the way music is supposed to be done. Live it, learn it, love it.

The Dresden Dolls Official Site
Amanda Palmer on Twitter
Brian Viglione on Twitter

Cheyenne’s other life is working in music therapy, and she is donating the proceeds from her single “Over the Moon” to benefit Louisville Hospital’s Norton Music Therapy Fund. It’s only a buck and you get a choice of high-quality MP3, FLAC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, or ALAC.  Cheyenne says, “I have watched these programs grow and have seen how much can be done with just a little bit of extra funding.  Every dollar helps, so give a dollar (or more!) and spread the word!” How can you beat that, you get a really nice song and help out some other people to boot??

Cheyenne’s debut album “Before Lately” came out on October 12. You can preview it at Bandcamp along with her other collaborations with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Maiden Radio. She will be finishing up her tour on November 17 in Chicago.

I have finally updated my portfolio. This is actually a quasi-temporary one; I am designing a separate portfolio site to encompass my different types of work and I used some of the pictures I’m putting in that site to make this one. Once the other site (maryelle-stclare.com) is finished, I’ll either change the link here to open that site in a new window, or I’ll keep them both but arranged slightly differently.

Anyway, I did this version in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.4. (Yes I’m still way back on v1.4!) Lightroom has several options for creating slideshows and Web galleries, the latter both in Flash and HTML. The Flash options include both Autoviewer and SimpleViewer, which are two very useful design solutions. Although I generally hate Flash and would not choose to design an entire site in it, I do like the look of it for portfolios. My previous portfolio was done in SimpleViewer although I used the WordPress plug-in to create it–not Lightroom. However, for some reason it stopped working correctly for me a while back and I could never get it fixed. The widget inside WordPress would generate part of the XML and then would just stop. So I had been looking for other solutions and realized that I had the almost-perfect one all along: Lightroom.

“Almost” perfect because there are a few quirks that have to be gotten around. In Lightroom, you can only specify the long edge dimension of your pictures. The software automatically makes all pictures that number. So, if you have both portrait and landscape pictures, Lightroom will make them all the same size on the long edge. It doesn’t keep the pictures at the size you uploaded them; it makes them whatever size you designate in the setup palette. This is a problem with portrait-orientation images: while 900 across is fine for landscape, it’s not optimal for portrait unless you don’t mind forcing people to scroll to see the whole image on a smaller monitor screen. I imported into Lightroom all my landscape pictures at 800px across and all my portraits at 600px high. But when I tell Lightroom “800px,” it makes the portrait pictures 800px tall. There is no way around this within the program, no matter whether you’re using a Flash gallery or the HTML version.  Maybe you can alter the XML file if you know code, but I’m going to assume most people don’t.

The way around this is to create a canvas for your odd-sized images that is the width you want them all to be, and make the fill color of that canvas the exact same color as the background, detail matte, and cells in your Lightroom gallery setup. Thus, although your portrait picture will be sitting inside a larger canvas, it can’t be seen. It just looks like the picture is centered.

First, you need to open your picture in Photoshop. You can either work with the TIFF or PSD, or with your final-sized JPEG. I did mine with the JPEGs so I’ll explain it that way but the steps are basically the same. If you use the PSD or TIFF, you’re going to make your new background canvas there and then save it as a JPEG when you’re all done with the steps listed below, instead of doing those steps to the JPEG itself.

MAKE A COPY OF YOUR PICTURES BEFORE DOING ANYTHING so that if you need to redo one, you don’t have to make a whole new JPEG from the original PSD or TIFF. Trust me when I say you will at some point need to do this and you’ll be glad you have a fresh untouched JPEG ready.

1) Open your image. Let’s say it’s a portrait sized at 400px wide x 600px tall. Let’s further assume that you have sized all your landscape pictures to be 800px wide by no more than 600px tall. Since I’m working with a JPEG, when I open the picture it’s one layer called Background and it is locked. You need to unlock that layer by double-clicking on it; the name will automatically change to Layer 0. Now you will be able to reorder it.

2) Create a new layer, which will become the background: Layer > New > Layer. This will automatically be called Layer 1 and will automatically be the same size as your existing canvas. It will appear in the Layers Palette above Layer 0, which is your original layer and the one on which you see the image.

3) Now you need to enlarge the canvas. In the Layers Palette, highlight Layer 1. Go to Image > Canvas Size. I want all my pictures in my gallery to be 800px wide, so I’m making the canvas 800px wide. You don’t need to change the height since you’ve already made sure all your images are 600px tall or less, although if you want to–so that everything is exactly 800×600–go right ahead. Click OK; now there will be a transparent canvas on top of and larger than your picture.

4) Make sure you are still highlighting Layer 1. Choose the color you are going to designate as the background in Lightroom. It is very important to make sure you WANT this color because you can’t change your mind later without going through all the steps again. I used #191919, which is a fairly dark gray. Make that the color of your foreground swatch (at the bottom of the PS toolbar). Go to Edit > Fill > Foreground Color. Layer 1 will now be filled with #191919. Now go to the Layers Palette and highlight the bottom layer (Layer 0). Move it up to the top. Now your image is on top of the gray background. Flatten your JPEG and save. Don’t forget to put your metadata and copyright in the File Info first.

Once you’ve done this to all the pictures you need to standardize, you go into LIghtroom and make your galleries. For the HTML gallery, in the Color Palette you need to make the Background, Detail Matte, and Cells the same color as you used for the fill in Photoshop. In SimpleViewer and AutoViewer, the only color to change in the Color Palette is the Background. In the Flash gallery Color Palette, you need to change the Background, Border, and Controls Background colors. Note that in the Flash gallery, the images float slightly away from the background and thus your “fill” canvas is slightly visible. It’s not obtrusive though, and you could if you wanted to put all your images inside a larger canvas so that they’d all float and thus create symmetry that way.

Once your gallery is done in Lightroom, you can either FTP directly from Lightroom to your website or you can export the files to your hard drive and then FTP to your site. I prefer to export to my HD and then FTP. You will need to make a new directory in the appropriate location on the host side of the FTP client that will contain your gallery files. Then copy over all the files and images from the local side of the FTP to the host side. Then you will be able to create a URL based on that directory structure and voilà, there’s your new gallery!

Reflecting In The Chrome , the premier archive and distribution site of the entire available catalogue of NIN live recordings has just announced their release of a beautifully engineered audio set of the the Nine Inch Nails show at the Lakewood Amphitheatre in Atlanta on May 10, 2009. I was honored to be asked to license to them the embedded album art for this audio CD. The accompanying DVD, edited by Matt Widner and to be released by This One Is On Us, should be out sometime this summer. There will be an exclusive preview of the DVD along with a photography slideshow of my images and others at the upcoming screening of “Another Version Of The Truth” – the definitive documentary of NIN’s 2008 Lights In The Sky tour and final Las Vegas show on 12/13/08, and the example to artists everywhere of what can happen when you allow non-label-produced video/audio recording and photography.

This was a pretty special and unique show, as Saul Williams, a warmly regarded collaborator of Trent Reznor and whose album “The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of Niggy Tardust!” was co-produced by Trent, made a surprise visit and helped burn up the stage by singing duet on Survivalism after which Trent covered Saul’s own “Banged And Blown Through.”

Johnny Blaze (twitter.com/tricil) on behalf of RITCNIN and TOIOU describes what went into engineering the audio:

The Reflecting in the Chrome recording of the week comes one year to the date after the 5/10/09 Atlanta NIN/JA show. A DVD is also in the works, edited by Matt Widner. Like AVOTT, our audio release is ready to go in advance of DVD release. This is a joint TOIOU/RITC release.

The audio matrix is a mix of three sources: JB, radiokid311, and Adam Lancaster’s own two-recording matrix, I took the sources and lined them up in Ableton (www.ableton.com), did some subtractive parametric EQing and multiband dynamics on the master. The sources add together beautifully, for all ranges of the frequency spectrum are present, only possible from a well done matrix. The sound is nearly soundboard in places.

-RITC News 5/12/09

Direct links to 24/48 Apple Lossless and MP3 here

Setlist:
Intro
1,000,000
Wish
Hersey
March of the Pigs
Something I Can Never Have
Metal
The Becoming
Head Down
Mr. Self Destruct
Reptile
The Big Come Down
Gave Up
Gone, Still
Survivalism (w/ Saul Williams)
Banged and Blown Through (Saul Williams Song)
Home
Physical
Down in It
The Hand That Feeds
Head Like a Hole

Please continue to check here, Johnny Blaze, This One Is On Us, and RITC for updates on the DVD.

Photography notes – click here for gallery

I had originally done my few pictures I thought worthy of posting back in May of ’09 but had several hundred more, some of which were good and some which weren’t. It’s always better to post less and better than just to dump everything you’ve got. And I had about 10,000 pictures over the course of the tour to go through and it’s a lot of work to process them all. As most people know, NIN had an “open camera” policy for their shows throughout 2010 and so for the dates on which I did not have a media pass from the band or a publication, I was still able to bring my DSLR in–which I did for every show I went to except one (the Palladium in LA on September 2). While this was an extreme advantage in many ways, not having a pass and being on the rail behind the barrier instead of in front of it meant I couldn’t move around at all and was jostled throughout the night by the hundreds of people behind me–so as you can see, most of the pictures from this show are taken at roughly the same angle from my spot at stage right directly in front of bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and in most cases focusing on the band through a bunch of mics and stands. That’s the reason most of my shots from this show did not make the “good enough to be posted” group a year ago. But when I was asked to provide the embedded photos for the CD–and given that they needed to be 1:1 and would not be printed–I felt that many “rejects” would work well as images that were not so editorial as I normally do but more artistically interpretive. (Yes some may call them “focused incorrectly.”) I am sure they’ll not be to everyone’s taste but it was an interesting experience for me to find the area in a full-sized frame that could be turned 1:1 and still have a story in it: I tried to make them mysterious and maybe mystical in a way, like a dream you might have where you can’t quite see everything clearly in your mind the next morning but you know you would remember it all if you could only push the fog away.

Nikon D300; Nikkor lenses 24-70 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, 85mm f/1.8.

There will be additional new pictures for the DVD, keep an eye out.

Yeah I know that sounds kind of weird and … um … not really anything most people think of when they think of going out to a club. But you might be surprised: as Alicia said that night, the Bible is violent and murderous and a lot of the people written about in it were “fucked up.” Alicia has a rather interesting background: she started violin at three and eventually got an MFA in poetry. After making the rounds of superficial literary parties and disappointing internships in NYC, she decided to go to Israel, where she studied ancient Jewish texts for 2 years, after which time she returned to New York to create the band–a convergence of poetry, music, and the mystical literature she had just immersed herself in. Not exactly a story you’ll see on American Idol.

Along with Alicia, Girls In Trouble are Aaron Hartman (Old Time Relijun, K Records) on upright bass, Tim Monaghan on drums and Jascha Hoffman on keys and glockenspiel. Get their debut album out on Jdub Records.

Shooting notes:
It was very, very dark. I used an 85mm f/1.8 and a 50mm f/1.8 mostly, with a little 24-70 f/2.8, but it was hard to get anything even with at wide open. I had been told that flash was OK to use, although I didn’t until the last half of the last song, just to see what kind of cool effects I could get with the combination of flash and ambient, but there was so little ambient that no cool effects were to be had.  The venue does have a lot of room though and it was easy to move around and get different angles, so that made up somewhat for the extreme darkness.

A grand entrance in yellow; the mask is painted on, which I didn’t realize at first.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

The only open spot on the stage was directly in front of me so I spent a lot of time looking straight up at Saul when he would come out to the edge and sing over the audience.

At one point during the show the band pulled up several girls from the audience and had a dance jam for a couple of songs.

Shooting notes:
No barrier, so I was pressed against the stage all night. I tried the 24-70mm lens but could see it was going to be too close, so I ended up switching to the 17-55 and kept that on most of the night, except for a short time using my ultra-wideangle Tokina 11-16. I think I shot everything at f/2.8 and ISO somewhere in the 1600-2500 range, but was able to leave the shutter speed rather slow at 1/60 or 1/80, and even a few shots at 1/40. So, I really didn’t have problems with a lot of noise in most shots. I hadn’t been to this venue before and had no idea what the setup was, so I brought my 70-200mm also: ha, I was so close all I could have gotten was probably Saul’s smile! Good venue to shoot in: easy to get in front (no barrier at this show), and fairly decent lighting for the most part.

Saul Williams, The Niggy Tardust Experience, Afro-Punk Festival, The Loft Atlanta, pictures images concert show venue photography photographer photographs maryelle st. clare meowhouse http://www.meowhousemedia.com

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