Rick’s Rants and Raves

A couple of weeks ago, I shot Mother Grove at the Dublin Pub in Dayton. As luck would have it, they had another performance within easy driving distance, so Anne and I looked forward to another night experiencing ‘da Grove. In addition, the lead singer, Brad, asked me to shoot a portrait for the band. That didn’t work out so well, but I did shoot the rest of their performance.

First off, Brad, if you’re reading this, you may want to stop. In this post I’ll describe the inner workings of an artist-wannabe. It would be kinda like me seeing you guys working out the early details of a new song, or watching the sausage being made. I think you’ll like the end product. The struggles that got me there might diminish your confidence in my photography skills.

OK, still here? I guess you really want to know then…

I struggled for the first hour of their performance with a sort of sophomore slump. I had been so pleased with my first set of pics that I was having a difficult time framing shots that I thought were worthy of the praise I’d received. It didn’t help that I was sleep deprived (my own stupidity). It didn’t help that I didn’t get to shoot the portrait. A pint of beer did help, a bit.

After the portrait tests, the next 50 shots were of Laura. Laura’s sweet, and I like her performances. I had also figured out from the first shoot that lighting a woman at a microphone playing a violin (aka fiddle) was very difficult. Unfortunately that knowledge didn’t really help my framing, just my determination to work with my light stand (Anne) until I started to get the results I liked. Laura also warmed up to my camera a bit. She told me during a break that she had attempted to not bounce around quite so much when she noticed me near by.

I think my determination paid off in the end.

As I was doing the post-processing, Anne asked why I was doing so many pictures in black-and-white. The reason is the color balance–the bar’s stage lights were about six different colors, from dark orange to pale blue. My flash was gelled to match a tungsten light bulb (overhead floods on the stage), and the camera was set to tungsten white balance. So the light hitting the performers from my flash looked great, but the rest looked like crap. Most of the pictures of the bagpiper, John, had him with a ruddy face and lobster-red arms. Black-and-white to the rescue.

During one of the breaks, a gentleman introduced himself “Hi, you don’t know me” and then went on to ask about my flash modifier. I described the purpose behind the snoot I had made out of craft foam: keep light on the performer of interest, and not blast the rest of the patrons or performers. He assured me that it was working very well–although I was taking flash photography in a dark bar, it was not obtrusive at all. Excellent. This is exactly the kind of effect it is designed for: drummer lit, drums not.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I didn’t like how much ambient light I had picked up by using a slow shutter speed. This time I kept the shutter around 1/80 with a wide open aperture, and ISO400. This meant that any snooted shot had a black background. If I used the flash diffuser (not as much this time), I could still see a fair bit of background. I had to use the diffuser if I wanted to capture the interaction between the performers, but that tended to show me the ceiling tile and slightly purple valence around the stage. Maybe my next modifier will be a fan shaped snoot so that the flash is wide but not tall (or tall-but-not-wide in portrait mode). This would have been an awesome shot with a fan-snoot:

On Peaches’ stage, the bass player, Jim, was in the second row, which vexed me greatly. I so dearly loved a shot from Dublin Pub that I was disappointed to not have my favorite wide-angle target easily accessible. Toward the end of the night, I put the flash, with diffuser, on a main speaker left of the stage. It had just enough angle to throw some light back on Jim. Laura noticed, and graciously stayed out of its way while I shot. Again, a shot of Jim is my favorite of the night (done in sepia at Anne’s suggestion).

Its funny. I felt pretty crappy about the shoot at the end of the night. Maybe it was the sleep-deprivation. Maybe it was my desire to make even more “oh wow” photos than before. Maybe it was my disappointment at not being able to do the portrait. But now that I’ve gone through the set, I feel like I did a decent job. Next time I’ll be sure to get a better night’s sleep before hand.

Brad, if you’re still reading, I hope you like them. And I really hope we can work out a portrait session again sometime soon.