Pale Young Gentlemen "Up North" (11.4 MB) from Pale Young Gentlemen Marquette Waterfront Festival Madison, WI June 14, 2009

Experiment time! Since the Marquette Waterfront Festival is an outdoor event, I decided to try out shooting a clip with my Nikon D90, knowing the dissipated sound wouldn't overwhelm its little mic. The potential advantages to this: 1) it shoots in HD, though I realized later that I hadn't actually set it to HD, and 2) I get the visual benefits of shooting through a nice SLR lens, with all the options that implies. But the disadvantages were many: 1) it's a lot heavier than my camcorder, 2) autofocus doesn't work for video, which limits my ability to alter the zoom angle very much, 3) can't really fiddle with any of the other options while shooting, either, 4) no image stabilization. But that said, I really like how the picture came out -- the detail's good enough to get a sense of how many little gnats were swarming around the lakeside -- and I think if I'd brought a tripod and thought about how I wanted to shoot in advance the weaknesses could've been overcome.