Rick’s Rants and Raves

Recently I was reading through some blog entries from Zack Arias hoping to learn a bit about band portrait photography. He was interviewed for another blog (now defunct, but available on Internet Archive) where he talked about the horrible press kit photos bands tend to use. He mentioned the Hall of Shame (the word they use isn’t quite so polite) for really bad band photos. In a brief (ha!) period of obsession, I went perusing the Hall of Shame.

I really like one of the themes of shame: “Nice Effort” These are folks who (evidently) published a band photo that had little more thought put into than “where’s the power button on this thing?”

Fortunately, I know I’ve progressed beyond this class of photo, but just a bit. My only band portrait to date was put together with about 15 minutes of planning (if you include loading my gear in the car) and about 20 minutes of post production. So, yes, I know it was taken in a bar, over a pool table, during a gig. But at least it wasn’t in somebody’s laundry room.

I also learned about some of the major cliches. It seems the step above “Nice Effort” involves someone saying “Hey, lets take your picture with this wall as the back ground.”

Or perhaps they thought, “Yo, there’s a train track next to Jimmy’s house. We should have you guys stand there!”

I’ll admit that as I first started trying to think of interesting locations for shoots, the first two ideas I had were a loading dock at a nearby warehouse (with really awesome brick!) and a train track thats close enough to for us to hear the trains (albeit faintly) from home. Fortunately I’ve learned of these cliches before I made these mistakes.

Another cliche is to have everyone in a circle looking down on the camera. I’ve seen other shots like this, but when it seems to be pretty common, the cuteness wears off.

The last cliche I’ll touch on is when the lead singer wants to make it obvious who the lead singer is.

Yeah, its amazing the other guys could fit in the frame with an ego that big.

So, my challenge now, is to figure out locations where I can make interesting shots in, what feels like, a not-terribly scenic town. The places I can think of almost immediately scream “trite” the moment I compose the shot in my head. Clearly I need to work on this more.

For the photographers reading my blog, I recommend a self-study of Know Your Sync, if you haven’t already.

I thought I would share my experience. It took less than 10 minutes to make all the shots, and not much longer to compile the resulting comparison photos. After shooting the umbrella specular, I grabbed a fake plant, put it on the floor, then put two different flashes through their paces both on and off camera.

Vivtar 285HV On vs Off Camera

Lumopro LP120 On vs Off Camera

On Camera: Vivitar vs LumoPro

Off Camera: Vivitar vs LumoPro

Summary:
My Nikon D60 can sync with both flashes on camera up to 1/250s with only a few pixels of shadow. With proper framing, I could even push to 1/320s.
However, off camera with Cactus v4, flash sync is much slower: The 285HV shows sync issues as low as 1/160s (only barely) and had a serious problem at 1/200. The LP120 had barely any impact at 1/200. I could probably push them to 1/250 as long as I framed my subject properly.

Other ideas not tested:
Built-in flash sync? No idea. What about triggering the LP120 optically with the built-in? I would imagine no better than 1/200s but I’d have to try it to be sure. What about consistency of sync speed –is it possible the off-camera 285HV at 1/200 was a fluke? Next time…

Last night, Skippy, Mike and I shot a reunion gig for Racecar, a local band.

It started as a request from Racecar’s front-man, Andy, to Skippy. Andy wanted Skippy to take pictures to memorialize the reunion. Skippy was familiar with my work and asked for some quick pointers to help him make better pics. He also invited me to tag along, enjoy a beer, a killer show, and shoot if I wanted to. Skippy didn’t intend to shoot the whole show–his primary goal was to have fun, not be a photog.

Skippy Chimping

This shoot was my first opportunity to make use of my latest shoot-bands-in-bars DIY light holder. It is an angle bracket, bent with a hook at one end, and a 1/4-20 bolt through a hole in the other to hold an umbrella swivel. I’ve got a piece of webbing with a cam buckle left over from a car-top carrier (long story, don’t ask). I’ve cut the webbing to about 12 inches long, enough to go around a 4″ diameter pole. I wrap the webbing around the pole, into the cam buckle, then slip the hooked end of the bracket under the webbing.  I made this because a couple of the venues I’ve been in recently have had structural posts in the middle of the seating area. Ruby Tuesdays had a pole like this one on each side of an entry way between the stage and bar area. I could tell that Skippy was more interested in taking his own pictures than being my Voice Activated Light Stand (TM), so I put this flash in place and left it there for the duration of the evening. The best part was that the batteries, Energizer Advanced Lithium, lasted all night. I had used them a bit in prior projects, but probably not more than 20-30 pops. During this event, they powered 200+ flashes at 1/4 to 1/2 power. Toward the end of the night they were getting a bit sluggish, but could still recycle 1/2 power pop in 5-7 seconds.

So, for the most part, I shot using the single off-camera flash, with a bit of ambient-only work using my Jive Thirty Five. Skippy had asked about flash techniques, and I poo-pooed the efficacy of using on-camera flash:

Rotating the head and bouncing off a wall will work well if it is a light colored wall. Most ceilings in bars are dark. Most walls are dark too, for that matter. Which means the flash will have to be pointed right at them.

However, the ceiling in this bar was a white (albeit dingy) panel drop ceiling. So Skippy made great shots using ambient and on-camera pointed about 45 degrees up.

By Skippy, on-camera flash

I, however, neglected to make use of the white ceiling, even though I noticed it early in the show. The off-camera flash yielded some decent results, especially since the front-man was such a great performer, just begging to be shot.

Skippy captured almost the exact same moment.

Ambient shots for me continued to be a bit of a struggle. I spend so much time in manual (with the flash) that I forget that it would be better to shoot in Aperture priority when shooting this stuff ambient. Many of my ambient shots are over exposed or over saturated because I didn’t let the camera make the decisions. Still, I managed to get a few decent shots thanks to my “spray and pray” attitude.

Mike was sitting next to me much of the night, and pointing out detail shots I should capture, or reminding me that I had neglected the drummer most of the night. Yeah. Drummers are a pain in the butt to photograph. And this one was no different. He was in the back where I could barely see him, and the flash could barely reach him.

My favorite shot of the drummer, however, came during tear-down at the end of the night. I shot this with the Jive Thirty Five, but since the show was over, I could stand on the stage to get the angle I wanted.

After Racecar finished their performance, Velvet Smallpants (not sure this is his preferred website) came on and kept us rolling with disgusting adult humor. I found it especially disturbing that I was one of the primary eggers-on from the audience.

Earlier in the night, Mike had suggested that some back-lit shots of Racecar would be cool. We discussed various methods of blinding the crowd with a high power flash from the bass drum, but decided against the technique. When Velvet Smallpants took the stage, I saw an opportunity.

Skippy continued to shoot throughout the night, despite his proclamation that “I want to be sure that I enjoy the gig, so I don’t expect to take photos through the whole thing.” Yeah, I think I might have helped stir in him a little passion for something other than beer brewing.

I think his shot is here.

It was a great time. Racecar really rocked with incredible passion. Velvet Smallpants kept us wishing we could wash our brains out. And Skippy and Mike were great company for someone like me.

I’ve continued to shoot using my Jive Thirty Five at Nathan’s Street Hockey Games.

ISO 400, f/2, 1/125

The best part about this game was the comeuppance three of the members of the other team received. These guys are brothers that had played on my kids’ teams in the past, but this year they’ve decided to participate at a different YMCA. When we entered the gym 20 minutes prior to the game, they started talking smack non-stop about a) how our team was going down, b) how they made the team last year when they were on it, and c) how we were just going to be crushed.

I love the celebration in the background of the second shot

At the end of the first period, they were losing 4-0. Mid-way through the second period (6-0), I walked by one of them who was still keeping up the bravado claiming that we were “going down” just as soon as he could get back on the court. To which I added “and scoring 7 goals.” The final, by my tally, (the Y doesn’t officially keep score, but all the parents and players try to) was 8-1. Boy was their celebration long and boisterous when they scored that one point. For the rest of their team, I was happy for them. For the sake of the three brothers, I really hoped for a shutout. No, not terribly sportsman like of me, but I think their egos needed a bit of a smack-down. That smack-down came when the final point of the game was scored by our team directly from the face off at center court–the oldest of the brothers was the goalie and had no idea it had gone through. I was too busy talking with the other spectator-parents to notice the mood of the three brothers at the end of the game.

Photographically, the biggest challenge is that with the open aperture, the depth of field is so narrow that it looks like most of the pictures are blurry. They aren’t–its just that the net (or the glove, or the spot on the floor 3 feet to the left of the player) are sharp, but the DOF is so narrow that everything else goes bokeh.

So, maybe next game I’ll try to compromise and shoot at ISO 800 and f/4. That’s still better than I could have gotten with my kit lens at 35mm (f/5.3) but it should render more of the photo in focus. And of course shooting kids moving at broken-neck speed makes keeping the focus point on a face challenging. Fortunately we’ve entered the digital “spray and pray” era, and I can shoot 100+ shots only to post nine.