Last night we were filming for an Electronic Press Kit I’m producing with one of our local bands, True West. I’ll detail the video production in an upcoming post, but I couldn’t help but grab some stills during the performance. This is a great benefit of the video-capable DSLRs like the Canon 5D Mark II: I was there to shoot video but I could switch to still shooting for certain parts of the performance with relative ease. These are some of my favorite shots of the evening. A larger gallery of images can be found at my Events page:
[url]http://events.dmg-photography.com/2010-truewest-watertown[/url]
They had some basic controls over the lighting, and every once in a while they’d turn on a combination that wasn’t hum-drum. The first photo is the band’s lead vocalist, Laura Pratt, shot in profile and underexposed to emphasize the backlight.
I always feel bad for the drummers — they’re almost always stuck in the back. I managed to catch Tom Greim with some decent light on him.
Jim Pedersen is the bassist and a vocalist for the band. The stage was dominated by two banks of lights flanking the performers. This means that the guys on the end have too much light and the main performer in the center has too little. Shooting into the light creates some nice effects.
That’s John Kelly on the guitar. He was one of the “end guys” that was getting blasted with the lights, so when they picked a low-light situation I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
Jim Pedersen again, shot at the same time as the first photo.
Allyn Dorr was the guy at other end, playing guitar and losing vision in his right eye from the lights. I’m not fond of hats, but if you’re going to wear one it’s nice when it contributes to the image rather than fights it.
Laura belting out another song.
John Kelly on guitar.
And a few more from the evening…
It was a fun night and they had everybody there dancing along — can’t beat that. I’m looking forward to getting the video into Final Cut and seeing what I can do with it. My thanks to John, Laura, Jim, Allyn, and Tom for letting me capture a bit of the evening’s fun.
Technical drivel:
All shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, ISO 1600, white balance set at 4000, manual exposure. Just looking at the pics here, they’re all with the 70-200mm f/2.8L lens. Because I was shooting video most of the time the camera was on a monopod and the shutter is typically at 1/60, but when I switched to more still shooting that got cranked up a bit (1/100 or so). Shooting video is why I had the white balance set as well — normally I don’t really care because I set the white balance in Lightroom.
Most of these images were shot using Live View and manual focus. I had the camera rigged for video shooting and so I was doing all of the composition and focusing using the LCD screen coupled with the Zacuto viewfinder. Near the end of the night, when I was done with the video work, I switched to the regular viewfinder and auto-focus.
All processed with Lightroom with varying amounts of processing (mostly clarity +20, exposure, levels tweaks, and occasional vignetting).
