Went to the one in Austin last Friday evening.
The music was chamber music, which I thought was going to be set to a beautiful and expertly executed slide show, shot at the right time of day displaying the magnificence of the park. It wasn’t. The music WAS GREAT, but it stopped there.
The photographer over used his limited quiver of techniques in my opinion. He used a Go-Pro for the motion pictures, and then sped them up. I don’t know what sort of camera he used for the stills. Neither the movies nor the stills were sharply focused, and there was no blending of one image into the next and some images appeared more than once.
The ‘speed up’ technique was used over and over. Initially, there was a long highway sequence of the trip to the park, most of which was highway stripes, but included the occasional image of something recognizable. It appears that the entire sequence was shot on U.S. 290W up to the edge of Fredericksburg, but no further. Unclear how they made it the rest of the way to the park, but they photographed every stripe for the first 150 miles.
Once at the park, all days were either overcast or the lighting was flat at the time it was photographed. The rocks had no highlight and no shadow detail.
Photographically, all were washed out. He stayed pretty much on the main roads (more shots of highway stripes), and the places he shot were in the sequence that he came to them, particularly on Ross Maxwell. He did include Old Maverick Road (highway shots without the stripes), but he did not tell a cohesive story with the photos.
I appeared he had a week off from work and went to the park to do his part of the presentation, but the weather was, at best, only fair. But one day the sun did shine. I would not have put them out there for the audience that attended.
I would guess that close to 100% of the people there were multi-year/multi-trip experienced, which could not have helped the photographer. My wife and I were surprised – we were expecting more. Perhaps unfairly.
Oh, and one more thing… Toward the end, it became obvious that the chamber group wrote about 15 minutes more music than there were BB photos, so the photographer filled the time void with astronomy photos, a few of which were shot in the park, but the bulk were shot by the Hubble Space Telescope. I wasn’t expecting this (the photos had nothing to do with the park) but I was thinking that I misjudged the guy. Initially, I thought, “These astro-photos are stupendous!’ So I just enjoyed space photography until, low and behold, I realized that there was no way these shots could have been made on Earth.
There were probably 30 extremely sharp deep space images of very, very dim objects, most of which are just barely visible by the best scopes on the planet. What was that all about??? It was like the end sequence on 2001, A Space Odyssey, when the astronaut descends onto the surface of Jupiter. It’s a light show!
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