Coming from Eugene I am not used to local bands sounding good. They have the instruments, and know how to play them but the end result usually isn’t all that great. It is funny because a lot of really good bands have come out of Eugene, but at some point the music scene decided to move to Portland. So with some trepidation I agreed to catch a live show from a friend’s band, not expecting much. If nothing else at least it would give me a chance hang out with friends and try some music photography.

Thankfully the band – Love Lies Dying – was actually quite good. The show took place at the Ash Street Saloon.

I was tempted to just sit back the entire time and just enjoy the show, but I noticed that no one else was really taking pictures. My D90 is a good camera, but when it comes to the kind of low light photography that most music photography demands – well there is a lot left to be desired. If I were going to try and make an honest living out of this sort of thing I would definitely want a full frame camera like a Nikon D700 or a Canon 5d mk II. Regardless I am a strong believer in working with the tools that I have, so with that in mind I threw on my fastest lens and decided to test a few shots – only to find a blurry mess. I tried again with a flash and found the results were clear but the flash had washed out the ambient stage lighting.

I was just about ready to give up when I got inspired by the work of a flickr contact of mine named Todd who runs the site ishootshows. I actually fired up the flickr app on my iphone and started browsing his stream to pump myself up. I am not going to pretend to be able to take as good of shots as Todd, but I wasn’t going to leave the show without giving it a second try.

In the end I had a great time and the band appreciated me shooting the show. The lessons I learned: take lots of shots, at least some are bound to be clear and make heavy use of Lightroom’s Luminance Noise Reduction.

Grado Labs is based out of Brooklyn and is a family owned business with the sole purpose of manufacturing quality high-end audio products and it shows. They make a wide range of headphones going from $49 iGrado street-style headphones all the way up to crazy $1695 PS1000. The SR-80s were about $95 when I bought them. The main selling point for me was that they offered a sound that was comparable to headphones that cost significantly more. If your experience with headphones is limited to the cheap white ones that came with your ipod then you are missing out on lot of detail in your music.

In about 2005 my headphones died due to a loose connection in one of the drivers – probably because of over use. After a brief attempt at repairing them myself which resulted in a mess of solder, I gave up not wanting to risk doing more damage. In May of 2007 I was still bummed that these great headphones were going to waste because of a tiny wire so I decided to send a message to Grado to see if they could repair them. Despite the fact that the headphones were a few years old they told me to send it in to the factory.

Holy Crap could a company really be that cool?

Thanks to my laziness I wouldn’t find out for another 2 years. At the beginning of July I decided to take a chance and mailed off the headphones along with a letter explaining my situation. I figured my options were to either trash these headphones which were going on nearly 3 years of not being used or to send them off to Grado where the worst that could happen is that they would be recycled.

Well today I got an unexpected delivery in the mail from Grado. In the box were my repaired headphones free of charge and they sound as good as they ever have.

Thank you so much Grado!