Darden Smith delights at Wheeler Arts Center

Texas singer-songwriter Darden Smith was the latest performer to grace the stage at the Wheeler Community Arts Center in Indianapolis on Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011, as part of the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe Series. It was one of the most enjoyable shows I'd ever attended, and I think a lot of that had to do with Smith's entertaining "stories behind the compositions" before he actually played the tunes. 

He handles bumps along the way nonchalantly -- such as when the battery in his electric guitar died in mid-song. Some performers might have freaked and unraveled; Smith simply called out to series coordinator Mark Butterfield to ask him to retrieve a new one. People in the audience felt like they were right there with him, rallying to fix the problem. It was impressive.

Butterfield changed the seating layout in the performance room of the center, which lies about a block and a half southwest of the namesake fountain in Fountain Square, one of Indianapolis' six designated cultural districts. The new layout -- putting the stage in the middle of one of the much longer two walls of the rectangular-shaped hall -- not only brought a lot more people closer to the performer, but it also introduced some wonderful angles for a photographer to exploit the neat stage lighting.

Smith is on tour promoting his new CD, "Marathon," and spent the first half of his performance playing songs from the new release. My favorites from the CD are "The Truth of the Rooster" (love the guitar chords, soft trumpet notes and piano trickles throughout, and the lyrical story of deception), the rhythmic "Bull by the Horns" and the stark, haunting "That Water." He used the post-intermission set to play requests from his repertoire, which dates back to 1984.

These images are from the Jan. 29 show; to see a full gallery of images from the performance, follow this link: Darden Smith at Wheeler Arts Center.

 

 

Above and below: Smith, giving the audience the story behind another of his new songs, and sprinkling humorous anecdotes along the way.

This 'stretch' wasn't such a bad thing

Anyone who's tried to use and display a digital image for their pc or mac desktop art knows the disappointment of not being able to select one that orients vertically unless you're willing to live with distortion or radical disorientation. If you pick a vertical/portrait image, then go to try to fill the whole monitor space with it by selecting the "stretch" option, the skew is abhorrent, and particularly so if the image contains a face or animal. You can center it, if you really want to use it, but it just doesn't have the same impact as filling the full screen.

Your pc/mac monitor usually is square or rectangular, so if you want the image to fill the full space on your monitor, using the "stretch" function, you're left to pick a horizontal, or landscape, shape. You probably can find plenty images in that orientation. In fact, that's what I've done for the past dozen years or so. Until two weeks ago.

I am quite fond of a backlighted vertical image from my Feb. 6 shoot in Garfield Park in Indianapolis, a sunny day that followed an overcast, full day of snowfall. On a lark, I grabbed the image to see how it would display "stretched" on my monitor as my desktop art. I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised. It gave the snow-covered ground a more prominent posture, and it elevated the background trees on the right to a position of a significant secondary element. Finally, when I looked at the image on my desktop, I could appreciate the tiny snow flecks sprinkled throughout the trunks and limbs of the subject trees in the foreground. And it almost seemed as if they sparkled.

I created a digital file of the "stretched" version by capturing a screen grab (after hiding all the desktop icons) and converting the ensuing image from bitmap to jpeg. The result of the conversion of the screen grab to jpeg appears above this post; the original image with the vertical orientation appears below.