Not Joplin, MO. Not Janis Joplin. Scott Joplin. I love piano music. I love to play piano music. And I espcially love to play Ragtime piano music. And Scott Joplin is the king of ragtime.
I haven’t played the piano much in the past couple of years, but every once in a while, I sit down at the keyboard and let ‘er rip, playing as loudly as I can. Today was one of those days, perhaps inspired by my trip to hear some jazz at the Mondavi Center last evening. What I really missed about the performances last night was a keyboard; it was all strings and drums. So I had my own jazz concert today, playing some boogie and some ragtime.
It occurred to me that I could use this as an opportunity to continue white balance lessons (the piano is in a different area from where I took the lemon photos yesterday) and I could blur some motion. This was tricky since I was going to provide the motion, so I had to set the camera on the Gorillapod and use the remote shutter release set to timed release so I could trigger the shutter and start playing. That was as much a challenge as was figuring out the white balance settings. So here I am playing Scott Joplin’s “Elite Syncopations” ( at least a few bars):
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I had trouble getting the correct white balance settings. I was trying to get the piano the correct color, a rich reddish walnut color without making the skin tones too red. This photo could use some white balance adjustment but this is straight out of the camera. I also had trouble getting enough blur (this is marginal) with keys depressed so it was obvious I was playing the piano and not just shaking my hands above the keyboard.
Lens @ 200mm
ISO 640
f/10
1/5
SOOC
You are so amazingly talented, Carol! Fabulous photo- and so ambitious to work on the motion- while playing RAGTIME! Awesome!