It is the biggest let down for any photographer. You step inside the venue, trot up to the stage only to find that there is no stage lighting, or worse still, there is no lighting and the band are playing on the floor in front of the stage because there are too many amps and drum kits on the stage for them to fit!
We’ve all been there and accepted another night of stark looking burnt out flash photos with little to no atmosphere. And for most of the time there isn’t a great deal you can do about it. Unless of course, you are working with the band you are shooting.
Click through to see some.. well, pretty fucking great shots.
Tuesday saw SurFaces, my favourite band of the moment added to the Dominatour bill with Annotations of an Autopsy and the much touted Trigger The Bloodshed.
It was also to be my last gig shoot as Avangelist Photography, going out with a bang was the idea, I hope that some people can see what I have done and perhaps will take note and try some things out themselves.
One of the greatest advantages to working with a band is that you gain a respect and trust with one another, this provides you with a bit more give and take when it comes to getting the images that you want to. With this in mind I discussed with the guys before hand that I was going to light the mother fuckers up with our own lighting rig. Of course our lighting rig wasn’t going to be your average LED pop bulb continuous lighting rail like the terrible gash that resides in the Engine Room, Brighton, oh no, ours was going to be Nikon powered!
This is something that Kevin Mason and Matt Halls from Garage Studios and I having been talking about doing for some time now, using multiple flashes at shows. Our main quandry was how to orchestrate VAL’s (voice activated light stand) so that they would know which member to be spotting and venue security getting funny.
Well I figured it was time to put our concept to the test. The above shot was captured using two Nikon Flashes. A single SB600 with a red gel attached was position to the left of the subject while a single bare SB800 was placed to the right of the subject. As any Nikon owner knows the real cherry for the CLS (creative lighting system) is that you can control powers from the camera, it sure saves time walking around to tinker, if you could adjust zoom heads at the same time it could be perfect. It could be except for one thing, the use of infra red receivers.
Like with your telly, if you don’t have line of site to the flashes (more specifically the front of them), they don’t fire so every time someone head bangs, moves just a few millimetres to ones side or the other the flash doesn’t fire.
This next image shows what can come out of this eventuality, however it doesn’t make it a bad shot. In fact I really like it. I was crouched on the beer soaked venue floor, as vocalist Joe cowered over me. The red flash was in my left hand pointing directly up at Joe, and the bare flash was a couple of meters away on a convenient shelf pointing in from the right hand side. Because Joe was 3ft in front of me it obscured the cameras line of sight for the bare flash leaving just the red to fire and the pop up flash of the camera added a minimal amount of fill light.
The result is still certainly spectacular but produces a very different effect.
If you would like to see the EXIF data, hi-res versions of these images, click through to their homes on Flickr
SurFaces
For more information on SurFaces, to hear their demo, buy the demo or a t-shirt (which are slick btw) visit www.myspace.com/surfacesbanduk
