Acker Night

Friday night was Acker Night in Prescott,  when most of the downtown businesses- restaurants, bars, shops, banks etc.- host musical acts to benefit music programs in town.  It went on for blocks, and I have never seen such huge crowds downtown.  We only managed to see a few blocks worth of entertainment during our walk around town with our friends, Debbie and Dale, but it made for a fun evening. Below are a few of the acts we enjoyed.

The group below was probably the most fun performance, and this photo is the only one I have of these guys not looking straight into the camera. I discovered that, in a small space, it is just about impossible to be unobtrusive with a camera- even though I was surrounded by iPhoneographers. I only brought my 50mm lens, which was a mistake. I chose it because of its sharpness and low-light capabilities, but found that the focal length on my crop sensor camera made it difficult in tight quarters (next year, I’ll use my 35mm).

I couldn’t resist taking a shot of Dale in his hat- it really suits him!

I loved this old truck we saw along the way.

And eventually it was time to say good-bye to the lights of downtown Prescott and head home.

Editing notes for the curious:

The layout of 4 photos in the beginning were all editing experiments in Lightroom using the Fader plug-in I downloaded a month or so ago and promptly forgot about.  If you have a lot of presets like I do, you might enjoy this handy little plug-in. Basically, when you want to use a preset, you choose it from within the Fader and then have the ability to reduce the opacity of the effect, like you would in Photoshop.  I normally tweak presets myself, but this gives me the ability to dial it up or down while looking at the results- very cool. What I don’t like about it is FINDING the plug-in in the menu in Lightroom- it’s not hidden, just inconvenient.  I wish Lightroom gave you the option to assign keystrokes to an item on the menu- or does it?

The photo of the country band was edited using my trial version of Topaz Impression (which unfortunately expired yesterday)- textures added in Photoshop.  The photos of Dale and the truck with the Santa hat also have added textures. The textures were from Kerstin Frank, Shadowhouse Creations, and Kim Klassen.