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Every year a spring concert is held on my school.
The school does not have any physical departments, but you could say that there still is a distinction between certain groups of the students and the classes they take such that there exists a group focusing very much on music. This means that concerts on the school are usually pretty good.
Sadly, I can't show you how the music sounds, I can only show you how danish high-school kids with guitars look like. But luckily they look pretty amazing too.
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This is the third time I attend the spring concert. It's the first time I have relatives playing in the concert, though that's not really the reason why I went there.
For some reason it's mostly the parents of the participants or their girlfriend or boyfriends who will come to see it these days. The first time I went, there seemed to be more students than parents at least, but it's not like that anymore. I feel a little sad over this course of things, as it seems the students get less engaged in school activities every year. The music is still good though, definetely still good enough to listen to, even if you don't know the people playing very well.
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At this concert you can see both first year students and the soon-to-be graduating students. Some of the first years will sound just like your average third year student while others are more new with performing. The third years will present some of the stuff they are preparing for their exams.
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In Denmark, when you've finished ground school, (which is somewhat equivalent to elementary and junior-high,) you can choose to take one of three high-school-esque educations which will grant you access to most universities after three years of study. Those are the "standard" ones like the one I am taking, a technology/practical oriented type which I've been trying out for one semester some years ago and finally a trade/business oriented type. You'll probably only find music enthusiasts in the first one. Apart from these three, there's of course the international schools and one special 2-year course that can be taken if you've been going to elementary school for 11 years instead of 10. And then there's the vocational schools, but I doubt they play a lot of music either.
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It's quite some time since I took pictures like these. I've been mostly taking photographs of the boring countryside landscapes that I live nearby as well as my friends having fun in silly costumes. Those are not really my favorites. I like nighttime photography and high-contrast stuff such as this. Last time I took photos of people performing on a scene was at Grand Hotel in Taipei. Back then, the lights were much better, so taking clear pictures without too much digital noisy and a narrower aperture was possible.
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The setup for this spring concert were nice for the viewing experience. Human eyes accomodate to the dark very well but cameras less so. The aperture was wide open and the autofocus mechanism kept catching the microphones instead of the people. Sadly, I'm not that good with manual focus, especially not in dark setting like this where people move around constantly at times. (Well, those who move around are much more interesting to take photos of, at least.)
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So, of course the photos still were great. Unless you look at them up really closely, you won't see it, but I still decided on doing some post-processing on them. Not that post-processing in any way can make up for bad photography skills, but it can make it less visible. (Yeah, I felt like I was really out of shape after looking through the photos I took. So many mistakes.)
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And although post-processing in no way can add more information to the photos, it sure makes them look better if you do it right. I cropped most of them, tuned the lighting, sharpened a few and even did a little bit of saturation on a few of the pictures. I feel like an artist. Spent several hours on it, too.
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The photos I picked out as my favourites and tweaked are to be found under the tag Spring Concert. As with the sound, I actually tried recording some with my mp3. I've been using that one to record the ambiance of a few places in Taiwan such as a ramen house and the MRT, it's microphone is really sensitive. Unfortunately, too sensitive for this occasion, in fact. I was standing behind some of the speakers while taking photos some of the time, so it doesn't sound good. Ah, well, there's finally another bit of rambling from me. If you missed me, I'm sorry to have taken so long since my last update.
Right now I'm on my Easter Break. Yay.
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Cya.