On Sunday night I went down to Madeira Drive, Brighton to the popular music venue/club, Concorde 2 to see a Ska Festival. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay too long, but I did manage to get in front of the crowd to take a few photos of some of the brilliant acts that were playing that evening.
Ettin, a 4 piece Ska band with a girl guitarist and vocalist were brilliant, and funny. I managed to grab a few decent shots which are below…
Band photography is, so far, probably the most difficult photography I’ve ever done. Its almost always in very low-light situations where the subjects move around a great deal while also pose a lot of different emotions and faces in a short time. Capturing the photos at the absolute perfect timing is critical.
For the above shots I was in the Fully Manual (M) mode set to f4 at 1/60th to make sure the subjects were not blurred, while also using my flash on its manual setting with a slight bounce. The flash compensation was down by just over a half off of the normal settings to make sure that the subjects were lit correctly, while also retaining the great lighting provided by the stage. ISO was set to 400 to increase the cameras ability to see in such dark, difficult conditions.
On an even more geeky-note, I’ve just noticed that Google has already seen, cached and indexed one of my photos off of my Flickr photostream and is ranked #1 in Google at the moment for "ettin ska". Weird and very, very quick indexing! Less than 6 hours ago I posted the photos to Flickr, and its even ranked higher than their myspace profile!
Band photography is great fun as there’s no expectations. Shooting bands is where an f1.8 lens comes in handy though!
You think it’s hard? Wait until you try a wedding.
Great pictures mate.
Thanks. I’ve always struggled to get decent Live photos due to the conditions. Also photographing group shots can be tricky if you are trying to be original and capture the band well. Will try to check Ettin out.