Maybe you’ll know it when you see it, but you’ll definitely know it when you feel it. Buddy Guy and Shemekia Copeland shared their brilliance the other night at the Durham Performance Arts Center, to a packed, highly appreciative audience. An audience that was there to feel the substance of Buddy Guy’s Electric Chicago Blues, and Copeland’s  R&B. -It’s so good to get a dose of the real stuff.

Shemekia Copeland

It’s always a real treat to be in such a lush environment at the DPAC. Great acoustics, and from our position at the front of the house there was no need for earplugs, so I could actually hear the sweetness and wailing of the blues guitar. Someone said that westerners could never understand or even truly hear the complexities of classical Indian music. But of all the music genres, there is a similarity in the string bending of the blues guitar to the playing of the sitar. It makes the glands in your head squeal with pleasure. Good stuff.

Positioned at the back of the the theater, I had to use my Canon 400mm 2.8 lens on a mono-pod (with the Canon 5D Mk IV body). The lighting at the DPAC  was straight forward tungsten with almost no changes. So once you get the exposure of the key light dialed in, you’re working worry free.  Settings were: 1/400 sec;   f/4.5;   ISO 3200. I’m finding that an ISO of 3200 is the magic number in the 5D IV’s. The shutter speed of 400 is there because I’m trying to defeat any kind of blur with the 400mm lens, but for this show using the monopod, with the vibration reduction feature of the lens, I might of gotten away with an ISO 160 or 200. But remembering every moment is a gamble, I took no unnecessary risks.