While digging through my collection of photo cd’s I came across this image from a family vacation in New Orleans. Of course this was before Katrina. I  consider myself fortunate to have experienced the city the way it was before the storm. I had been to New Orleans before but I was on a job and only had time for lunch and a brief stroll through the French Quarter before catching a flight back home.

You can’t go to New Orleans and not visit Presentation Jazz Hall. You’ll want to take pictures but flash photography during a performance is frowned upon. The ambient light level is very low, great for setting the mood but lousy for photographs. Even with my ISO set at 1600 and an f/2.8 aperture, my shutter speed was only 1/6th of a second. Naturally, I was concerned with camera shake. I didn’t have a tripod  but even if I had, there was no way I would have set it up as the place was packed. All I could do was use the “spray & pray” technique. Set the drive to high and fire off multiple volleys until the buffer is full. With this method, typically the first and last frames are blurry but at least one frame in the middle is sharp. I learned this technique from Seth Resnick while attending D-65’s, Workflow not Workslow Workshop.