Shooting a band

                                                  How I shoot a band (with a camera)

 

I sat there, watching the opening band, as I always do, and thought to my self; man, I wish I had my camera with me. Then it dawned on me that I've said that to myself a hundred times in the last 3 years. So, I started bringing it to gigs. 

Ever since the passing of our friend Larry Anderson, I really think the musical community got a little closer. I've always enjoyed live music and over the years we've all made some great connections. I'm glad to say, most of the musicians I grew up playing with, are still going strong. I consider myself lucky to play every weekend and reaffirm those connections. That being said, most of the bands I photograph are my really good friends and it gives me great pleasure to see them play.



First Brigade
 

 

Billy Osman

Tim Romanowski

I.s.o.

I know it stands for something, but, I'm not sure what. It simply is the sensitivity of your camera sensor. Low ISO, you need lots of light. High ISO, you don't need as much light to correctly expose a picture. When you turn up the ISO dial or increase the number, the more sensitive your sensor is to light. The benefit of a high ISO number is; you can take pictures in low light without a flash. The drawback is; more visual noise is present. The sensor needs to fill every pixel with something, but, if the light is low, it just makes up the information as close as it can get it. The image is amplified to write data to the sensor, in other words. That's why I usually shot in black and white. The noise just looks like film grain and to me, that's perfectly acceptable, to a point. The noise in a color digital picture is different. If you zoom in a a picture, you can see orange or red specks in the areas that should be black. To me, that doesn't look good. Rick Sammon, http://ricksammon.com/, says, if you notice the grain in a picture, it wasn't a very good picture in the first place. I agree, but, color noise is just not good looking.

Paul Goc

 If your camera has an adjustable ISO setting, try setting it for 'auto ISO'. That means, the camera Decdie's how high it sets the ISO. i you don't have 'auto' try 800, and use the 'p' mode on your camera. If you don't have 'p' than use 'tv' or 's' mode at around a 60th to 125th of a second. Take a few shots and look at them. If the noise is acceptable to you, try it under just one bright light. I it's still o.k., You should be alright.  If you notice a lot of extra noise, try turning a few things off. Canon has a feature called 'lighting optimiser' but most cameras should have some sort of noise reduction settings. These tend to soften, or slightly blur the pixels to make the noise less noticeable. Try all of them off. I

always have all my noise reduction settings turned off.

 

One thing I notice, is when you start showing the pictures on facebook, the bands really appreciate it.

Please, give these methods a try and let me know how it turns out.