Do you have any essential tips for shooting punk type shows? Like flash vs ambient light
Oh shit I didn’t even see this message! For some reason I didn’t get the little message notification thingy. My bad holmes. So as I’ve been shooting shows I’ve been picking up little things here and there. Which you will along the way too. have kind of a ghetto setup… I have a Bower flashgun that’s dedicated to a Canon but I’m able to use it on a Nikon. You should be careful with using incompatible flashguns with your camera or else it can fry it! The problem with this is that I can’t fine tune the settings with the flash and the camera.So, when I got to shows I usually check out the lighting setup they have then weigh my options from there on whether or not I use a flash or not.
So this was a few nights ago at The Silent Barn. This is in ambient light with a low shutter speed @ 1.8 with a high ISO(1600). They have these blue piercing lights which kinda sucks in that if you decide to go with color, It will be hard to color correct or get natural skin tones (If that’s what you’re looking for). Chances are you don’t want them to look like Smurfs though. At shows you want to avoid shooting with those strong red & purple gel lights like the plague(It does depend, though. It can sometimes produce a nice effect). It can oversaturate the fuck out of your images and be almost impossible to color correct. But It really does depends on a number of factors. I do prefer black and white with ambient light at shows most of the times anyways. In this case I did used the available light and then changed it into black and white.
This was my attempt at color correcting. Bleghh.As for flash, If they have very low light available, obviously I would shoot with a flash. I recommend getting a bounce on your flash or something to that level because what you want is the light to reach the ceiling (or wall, in which case the bounce would be useless) and light your subjects directly at the same time. Since I don’t have the scratch for a bounce I point my flashgun backwards at a 45 degree angle to the ceiling which gives me a pretty desirable result. I don’t recommend this because everyone will hate you. The flash can make a full on assault on everyone eyes behind you if you aren’t careful. Just don’t bounce directly towards the ceiling. It will give everyone racoon eyes!! So yea, get a bounce! http://www.thephoblographer.com/2014/02/24/useful-photography-tip-94-dont-just-bounce-flash-towards-ceiling/
This was from a DBA show. I used a flash with ambient light 1/30 @ 2.8 ISO 200
When I shoot with the flash I usually use a low shutter speed like 1/20 or 1/30 . I really like this result because the subject(s) and room can be well lit up with the flash but you can still get the ambient colors from the existing lights in the room. This can also produce cool light trails depending on your shutter speed.
That’s the final product. You can see the rest from this show on my blog.That’s about all I can really think of for you at the moment. If you have any other questions I’ll do my best to help!
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