Local Band Photos

[78novacaine]

CC please, what you like, what you don't like, how they could be improved:


By davidmsager at 2011-03-18


By davidmsager at 2011-03-18


By davidmsager at 2011-03-18

[groovyone]

My first question would be, what was your intended look?

[78novacaine]

Wide angle, over-exaggerated, with still elements as well as motion captured. I usually try to do a more natural look, so I am trying to find out if what I did here works or if I am better off sticking with my usual style.

[Steve Balderrama]

I kinda like what you are trying to do there. OTOH, it sorta looks like those pictures that are supposed to use red/blue 3D glasses to look at. :) It looks like using a combination of ambient and flash? The resulting "daylight" temp of using flash for this kindof stuff just looks wrong to me. I'd warm it up more to make it look like ambient stage lighting to some extent.

In the middle one the band looks great, but the singer is just in a bad pose, it looks like hes just standing there talking to people.

[78novacaine]

Originally Posted by Steve Balderrama

I kinda like what you are trying to do there. OTOH, it sorta looks like those pictures that are supposed to use red/blue 3D glasses to look at. :) It looks like using a combination of ambient and flash? The resulting "daylight" temp of using flash for this kindof stuff just looks wrong to me. I'd warm it up more to make it look like ambient stage lighting to some extent.

In the middle one the band looks great, but the singer is just in a bad pose, it looks like hes just standing there talking to people.

Yup, ambient + flash, around 1/10 on the shutter to capture the motion blur, I have some that I sped up the shutter to freeze the members, and some where I drug it a lot slower to get a more drastic effect, I liked these as a happy medium.

I warmed them up a good bit from where they were, I was going for a more natural look, guess I should have pushed it a bit further, the stage lighting was very poor at this show hence the need for flash in the first place, even f1.8, 1/60, and ISO 3200 were not cutting it for the most part

Yeah, I have a few more of the whole band where Jordan is more animated, however the rest of the band doesn't look as good as in this one, so I had to make a bit of a compromise. Shooting blind with your camera held as high above your head as it can go is hard, lol, I didn't even think to use my live view screen because I am a ruh-tard

Thank you for the critique!

[Steve Balderrama]

I've shot in places with my 5Dii at 1/50 f2.0 at 6400 iso and still been underexposed in camera. Surprisingly, they still look pretty decent when brought up a bit. I personally don't like to use flash at shows just because it kindof kills the ambience and I don't like the hard shadows. I have experimented with using a ring flash as a fill, and that wasn't too bad. Flash can also annoy the heck out of the performers if used too much. I like that you were being creative with it though and think that can actually work.

[78novacaine]

Originally Posted by Steve Balderrama

I've shot in places with my 5Dii at 1/50 f2.0 at 6400 iso and still been underexposed in camera. Surprisingly, they still look pretty decent when brought up a bit. I personally don't like to use flash at shows just because it kindof kills the ambience and I don't like the hard shadows. I have experimented with using a ring flash as a fill, and that wasn't too bad. Flash can also annoy the heck out of the performers if used too much. I like that you were being creative with it though and think that can actually work.

Thanks, and that's the main reason I don't like to use the flash is annoyance to the artists, luckily these guys are all friends of mine so they are more than happy to let me flash away as long as they get good pictures out of the deal, haha.

Do you think these look better on the WB? Seemed a little too warm to me:


By davidmsager at 2011-03-19


By davidmsager at 2011-03-19

[Steve Balderrama]

yeah, those look better to me on my laptop monitor, but still not as warm as I'd like on my color managed monitor. Thats all just personal taste though... if I'm forced to use flash at a concert I prefer to warm the lighting up to where it looks like it was stage light if possible.