A little late in the game, aren’t we YouTube?

**Just noticed the video doesn’t embed in widescreen mode, but with black bars instead. Had to edit the code to get it to display here in widescreen… interesting. Also interesting is the aspect ratio is not a perfect 16:9 but more like 125:77. Yum…

An oldie but goody. Was shown this by the guys in Superchick a few days ago.

“What happens when you play back a prerecorded synthesizer track at 48K instead of the intended 44.1K? The whole track plays back a little bit faster and at a slightly higher pitch, that’s what. A dissonant musical mess ensues, trapping the guitarist and bassist in an on-stage musical hell with nowhere to go.”

Since I’m doing a lot more photography lately (I’m trying to go totally “pro”) I’ve been running out of locations to shoot at. I’ve over-used a few great locations (cheekwood botanical gardens!) and now I’m stuck trying to find some new places. This is pretty difficult in Nashville since just about every place has been found and used 100 times. Except the exclusive locations. And by that I mean places you can’t just walk right into or you’d be kicked out or fined.

A few months ago a friend of mine who I’ve done a lot of fun practice shoots with convinced me to try out a location I had been skeptical about - the old Tennessee state prison. It was the shooting location for the film “The Green Mile” and is now abandoned and very very creepy. So we went at midnight, naturally. Well turns out there is a guard tower and huge fence around it (go figure!) and there are still guards there… and they said had they had one more security guard on duty they would have let us in accompanied by one, but they didn’t that night.

Sometimes it takes a lot of patience and crazy amounts of google and flickr research (looking through thousands of photos and then trying to find out where the cool ones were taken!) but in the end I think it’s worth it to get a more original shot. I believe location scouting is a big factor in what separates the best photographers from the rest. It took me a long time to learn that driving around town for hours is not all there is to finding good locations. The real trick to it is being invited to lots and lots and lots of exclusive places - which you can only do by extensive networking.