Shooting a band solo
This past Thursday, I shot Mescalito and New Pollution, but without the benefit of my lovely voice activated light stand. As a result, making decent shots was much more difficult, but forced me to experiment a bit more than usual.
The first experiment was to trust my gear on a shelf, in a bar. Most of the best shots came when the flash was mounted on my clamp-pod clamped to a shelf about 7 feet up.
In this shot, the flash is camera left, with stage lighting hitting the near sides of the subjects. This turned out to pretty decent if I wanted to shoot either one of the two in this picture. Shooting the other 5 members of the band was way more challenging.
For example shooting the drummer required that I set the flash-on-camp-pod on a chair back, flash zoomed out, and I had to line up the flash so that its light could get through all the gear that was casting shadow from the shelf mounted position.
With the flash set, it was difficult to find an angle on the drummer except on my knees underneath a huge speaker, with a 300mm zoom. I’m pleased with the result. I think this is my best shot of Harold so far.
Another technique I messed with was to optically trigger the flash-on-the-shelf with my on-camera flash. I did this because I knew that the non-flash side of their faces would be very dark. Here’s an example: first, only the remote flash is used, triggered via wireless.
Next, I took the wireless transmitter off, and enabled my pop-up flash, but set the power manually down to 1/4 power.
I would have rather had lower power on-camera, but that meant the optical slave didn’t notice. So this shot is OK, but I don’t like the shadow behind his head. I might have been able to fine tune this shot by moving back a wee bit, but a) not always possible in a bar, and b) many times the moment is over after I’ve made adjustments. I’ll just try to remember these for next time.
Finally, I decided to play with high ISO shooting, fully knowing that the results will be grainy. Hey, its a bar! Of course the photos are grainy. I really like this angle as Theo was being framed in Andrew’s sax.
I got a couple of decent shots of New Pollution, who followed Mescalito on the same stage. Unfortunatley, I was already aware of the challenges of not having my VAL, so I didn’t work too hard on these. I think these were shot with external flash on-camera with a large diffuser.
The one thing I really liked about the venue was the moon on the wall behind the band. It made for a really cool background.
