Benni invited us round to his place last night to celebrate him turning older than he’s ever been before. 
here’s some pictures of the evening:
Benni turns 23. :)
alternatively, here’s a flash gallery:
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quick update: eva and i have moved and are more or less finished with the move. flo & ursi came for dinner last night and brought some flowers with them. i love the way the colours just pop against the black background of our *massive* windows.
more tulip pictures on my flickr page.
what a weekend. police band concert on friday evening, playing and emceeing is very hard work. went down really well and was an enjoyable evening.
skiing on saturday at the stubaier gletscher (pictures to follow). “junge solisten am podium” by the innStrumenti chamber orchestra was the evening’s entertainment on saturday.
sunday was a lazy day, spent most of the afternoon playing around with the latest, greatest version of lilypond. the evening was spent at a concert by the kammerchor walther von der vogelweide, conducted by claudio büchler, also the conductor of the uni orchestra.
this was quickly done in the improvised kitchen studio before dinner:
the tomatoes and the garlic in the basket have been surprising me every day with the simple colours, so i decided to knock together a quick studio in the kitchen. a large cardboard back-wall made from a weetabix box, lit by an overpowered sb-900, another sb-900 with a dome diffuser off to the right, kindly held by eva. 
not perfect, but not too shabby for a job knocked together in 3 minutes…
the picture at the top was taken during a short break from transcribing music. the sun hit the glasses just right on my laptop case, and luckily i had my camera sat next to me.
i had to setup a really quick portrait for the conductor of our band this afternoon. as he was slightly pressed for time, i asked gabi to jump in as a quick lighting model. and got this shot, which i’m quite happy with.
while i was trying to work out how to do portraits yesterday evening, i got this nice shot of eva:
next time, i’ll try not to cut off the side of her hair.
and here’s the 2 portraits of our conductor:
last night was definitely a culture night. first stop of the evening was the 2nd symphony concert of the TSOI’s current season. their new principal conductor, georg fritzsch, conducted his debut concert with the TSOI, playing debussy’s la mer and richard strauss’ alpensinfonie.
fantastic program selection and very well played. mr. fritzsch conducted everything by heart, which is a fairly amazing feat if you take a look at the score to the alpensinfone. all in all, it was a very impressive concert and i’m looking forward to future concerts conducted by mr. fritzsch.
second stop of the evening (after grabbing a pizza) was the ambient art lounge, organised by harry triendl. the concept is intriguing, it’s basically a semi-organised jam-session for electronic music. i think the most interesting part of this concept is that ambient music is generally created in a studio and heavily tweaked and refined. getting a group of people together with a set of rules (my favourite: tolerable volume. ) can result in chaos, or as shown yesterday, in some very enjoyable ambient music.
we caught the tail-end of an art installation by urbeil consisting of soundscapes supporting a critical text dealing with the andreas hofer cult and emancipation. (a different form of dealing with andreas hofer’s historical image can be found in an earlier posting).
the idea behind the jam session, as far as i can tell, is that everyone is allowed to bring their equipment and set up before the session starts. everyone gets piped into the master mix and can take part however they want. this singer laid vocals over the soundscapes being created by the guitarists on stage. sounded cool, but the lighting also made for quite cool photo-opps.
nikon d90, 50mm f/1.8 and 24mm f/2.8 primes running at ISO 1600 in manual mode. i love these two lenses for low-light photography. i had a flash with me, but decided not to use it, as i wasn’t sure what the etiquette was. pictures were post-processed in DxO to get rid of the noise, slightly adjust the black point and improve the contrast (which is already good straight out of the camera). i’m fairly happy with the results, even though one or two pictures could do with some slightly different enhancements.
here’s the slideshow:
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alternatively a standard HTML album:
Ambient Art Lounge #16 at the Live-stage Innsbruck.
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