by Brandon
May 7, 2010 02:00 AM
Happy birthday, Billy Joel! To celebrate Mr. Joel's 60th anniversary of breathing and doing other things, Illinois' #1 Billy Joel cover band, Silly Joel, assembled once again, this time at the Hoogland Center for the Arts in downtown Springfield on May 1.
For this performance, many friends of the band dotted the packed hall at the HCFTA. The band members, who like their shows to be light-hearted and fun, celebrated keyboardist Virginia's real-life pregnancy by also being pregnant (even the men). Check out my photos and video from the performance below.
Silly Joel's talents are not consumed entirely by the works of Mr. Joel. Silly is also known to dabble into the works of artists such as Prince (or the artist formerly known as Prince) and more.
Click below to view the performance photos at my SmugMug gallery:
About the photos:
These were mostly photographed on a Canon EOS 50D with the Canon 100mm f/2.8 IS macro lens. The hybrid IS in the lens helped a lot when snapping these shots from my table with no flash.
About the video:
The video above was shot with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i with a Canon 50mm f1/4 prime lens. Audio was recorded with the built-in microphone. Before leaving home, I grabbed that camera and lens as an afterthought, thinking it would be fun to experiment with concert recording. When I arrived, I was lucky enough to get a table at the front. The camera was sitting on top of my camera bag, so I didn't have a good way to pan to all the band members while recording. I could only move it between songs.
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the videos turned out. I took clips of many songs at a variety of settings. Some were shot at 1080 and 20 frames per second while most were 720 at 30 fps. The final version above was scaled to 720 at 23.95 fps.