Who shot JR?
July 27, 2008
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