Collegian Photo By: Ben Roth
Collegian Photo By: Ben Roth
Shooting bands indoors or outside at night can be a difficult task. This past Friday I had the pleasure of shooting local band JR and Natalie on stage at Cafe 210. Many things factor into the difficulty of the average band setting. There is often a crowd to combat just in order to get up to the stage. The lights are strobing, multi-colored, and constantly dimming. And to make things even more difficult the band members are often moving constantly.
To combat the majority of these problems I set my camera to manual mode, and I take my light meter readings when the lights are at their brightest levels and work from there. Metering for brighter lights allows me to drop my ISO so that I get a clean picture with low noise levels, decrease my aperture so that I get more things in focus, and increase my shutter speed so that I can stop or slow the action so that it is visible. Once you have your camera set to the brighter lights the band uses throughout their set, it's only a matter of timing your shot to when the lights get bright.
Color is another factor in shooting bands using many different lights. I have better success setting my camera's white balance level to auto. Trying to manually compensate the white balance for the various lights used by bands is borderline impossible in most scenarios.
Oh, and as far as the crowd goes... Well, you're on your own for that one!
- Ben
Welcome to State College, Penn State and Summer 2008. For those of you who are regulars to our blog, welcome back, and thanks for the views and making the "Exposure" blog the most popular blog of the Daily Collegian. We appreciate the support from you as well as the bragging rights around the office. The support and the chance to get our work out there drives us to improve and work harder for the shots.
Growing up, I was the kid who had no regard for his personal well-being. You know, that kid who would dive headfirst (in Roberto Clemente fashion) into the wall to catch a ball whether it was catchable or not. Yeah that kid was me. I loved diving across the ice in that last ditch effort to knock away a puck even if it meant my hip would hurt for a week. Now here I am, moving on from sports to photography, my new passion and love. Have I changed at all? No, not a bit -- and that's how my staff operates.
If you see a kid scaling a building, hanging upside down from a tree, laying in the middle of the road, or any other number of ridiculous and slightly dangerous things that's probably me or someone on my staff. Believe me being a photog isn't the safest job in the world. I've been run over by defensive backs and running backs, hit by basketballs -- almost a hockey puck -- and other flying objects, including crowd surfers at a Taking Back Sunday concert. And that's not nearly the worst that could happen. We take pride in our ability to get a shot. We strive to work harder and longer then other people to make our paper look better. To get you to pick up our paper and come to our blog.
On this blog we post our best photographs (not pictures) of each week. Then we chose one of those for the photographer, who shot the image, to talk about. That's how the basic format works and it will be updated every Sunday for Monday's viewers to look at. So enjoy and keep coming back.
