Richard Archer looking kind of like Steve-O

Hard-Fi played a free FNX show last night which was pretty fun. Their debut album Stars of CCTV is almost a little too enjoyable as it hops between sounds more so than their more popular but crappier contemporaries (Maximo Park, Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads). I probably would have put the album in my '05 top ten if the lyrics had some vaguely interesting subject matter; as it stands, it deals with the daily tribulations of being a lad from working-class England, which I just don't give a shit about. All that said, no less than eight of the albums eleven songs are good to great. Lead singer Richard Archer doesn't totally pull of the rock star part in their videos but he was a pretty good frontman, effectively keeping the crowd into it for the duration of the roughly 60 minute set.

Hard-Fi / "Hard to Beat"



It also was a good chance to test out my new camera, a Canon SD550 that the Colonel shelled out for as a Christmas gift. It's the latest in the Elph line, meaning it's compact and easy to use, but doesn't offer the most manual control options. My old Elph SD100 had 3.2 mp/2x optical zoom, so I was expecting much better results from the 7.1 mp/3x zoom SD550. The zoom still isn't good compared to larger cameras, but the only thing worse than being a dude taking pictures at a show is being a dude taking pictures at a show with HUGE camera. Anyway, I had always had problems photographing concerts because the lack of lighting except for generally behind the band. This meant a) unless I was really close I couldn't zoom in very close, and the resolution wasn't big enough to even consider using the digital zoom b) any pictures taken at shows needed flash to avoid massive blurring c) using the flash generally washes out the picture, killing any cool lighting effects, as well as the contrast between the background and the subject. I took my first couple using the flash by accident, but then switched over to non-flash for most of the rest. It's still kind of hard to get great crispness without flash, but I set my ISO at 400 and dialed down the exposure as far as I could, which seemed to work OK. The exposure I set based on a random thing I read somewhere on the internet, so I'm not going to act like I know why that helped. Anyway, I was generally pleased with the results, as the red, blue and greenish-yellow lighting used during the show is largely preserved.