I don’t work with controlled lighting all that much, so I rarely get to use the photographer’s trick of making dramatic portraits by lighting a subject with warm tones and setting white balance to tungsten, letting the sunlit background go to blue. Sometimes, though, I get the chance to do this by happenstance, as when a musician performs under incandescent lights outside or near a window while there’s still some daylight left. Above, Molly Hagen performs at Artomatic yesterday, a perfect opportunity to shift my white balance and turn the background to deep blues. Actually, the light on Molly was way beyond tungsten; it was a red-gelled incandescent can. I had my white balance at the minimum 2500 Kelvins and it was still too red - oh well.

Here’s another where there wasn’t quite enough sky visible to get quite as dramatic an effect. Also, the photo kind of sucks a bit. Whatever. This is Jan Bang, performing during Nordic Jazz Week with Arve Henriksen, who’s pictured in an earlier post:

I really want to do some portraits like this - next time I’m doing a portrait session outside I’m definitely bringing my CTO gels.

I am pretty pleased with what I managed to get out of two days at Maryland Deathfest back in May. I saw and shot 32 bands (!!!), enjoyed most of them, tripped my shutter probably 4,000 times, ultimately posted 400+ keepers, got a few published in Decibel (see below), took advantage of awesome access to get some relatively unorthodox shots, and escaped it all without so much as a mild headache.

In looking through my favorite shots, it occurs to me than many of them are a bit non-standard. When one shoots 32 bands in a row, the usual live band shots start feeling pretty cookie-cutter and boring. Thankfully, the extremely liberal MDF rules for photographers allowed for a lot of experimentation: flash or no flash; photo pit or stage perspectives; a multitude of opportunities for great fan shots; etc. I tried to make sure I bagged a few “normal” shots of each band, but if I was feeling up for it, I spent some time looking for different things as well.

Sometimes, different things just happened, and it was easy, like the headline photo where Sigh’s Dr. Mikannibal spat fire at the audience to close out the festival. I stupidly didn’t realize what she was about to do even though I’ve seen videos of her doing it at previous shows, so I stayed in place right in front of her instead of moving to get a profile view. Oh well: a side view would have been more illustrative, but the head-on view is arguably more dramatic.

I’m not quite sure I got the hang of shooting from the stage or the side of the stage, especially without flash - balancing the exposure was tricky, especially indoors. But I got some neat things like the above. Outdoors, it was a bit easier, especially at the time of day when the fading sunlight on the crowd was roughly balanced with the lighting on the stage. Then, I could get some wonderful shots like this one, which was one of the ones to appear in Decibel:

That one was taken with a rented 10.5/2.8 fisheye, which brings me to the gear question. For the most part I used my D300 with fisheye attached alongside my D700 with rented 24-70/2.8 (amazing lens, by the way, and likely my next acquisition once I make enough money to pay for it). I got occasional use out of my 80-200/2.8 on both bodies, depending on my needs. On the inside stage I sometimes pulled out the SB-800 flash, and I actually wish I used it a bit more. Inside, when shooting available light I was generally at ISO 6400 on the D700, and I think I could have gotten some more consistently good stuff with more use of flash. Still, it’s way too easy for flash concert photos to all start looking the same after a while, so I’m not all that torn up about it.

Anyway, I won’t even try recapping my highlights here. For that, check this Flickr photoset, or if you’re really brave, go look at the full Saturday and Sunday sets - over 400 shots between them.

Below, my tearsheets from the August issue of Decibel.

I was initially disappointed that the last night of Nordic Jazz Week 09 was moved inside from its original location on the picturesque roof of the House of Sweden. But as it turns out, the inside of this marvelous building is equally picturesque, and further, I didn’t really need a beautiful environment to get some good shots. My favorite of the evening was this tight shot of trumpeter/vocalist/electronics wizard Arve Henriksen. (Note: ISO 3200, no noise reduction of any kind.)

Thanks to Arild Strømmen at the Norwegian embassy.

I had the wonderful opportunity to have (almost) unfettered access to shoot First Lady Michelle Obama yesterday as she gave a short luncheon speech to attendees of Greater DC Cares’ Business and Nonprofit Philanthropy Summit and Awards event. At this event, the press were stuck all the way in the back of the room, with photographers allowed to approach the buffer for “four clicks only.” Makes the three-song rule look absolutely luxurious in comparison. Inside the buffer were four Secret Service agents, White House photographer Samantha Appleton, and… me (after several rounds of security clearance). So that was fun.

I don’t envy working photojournalists covering events like this. It’s pretty tough to take consistently interesting (much less creative) photos of people speechifying, especially when you’re stuck at the back of a room shooting with a mega-telephoto lens. Luckily I was able to move around and find some different angles, and I had some decent elements to work with, including some gorgeous blue lighting on the curtains behind the podium. There were many other shots I would have liked to have tried, but I figured those Secret Service agents would probably take a dim view of my standing directly behind the First Lady during her speech. So I played it pretty safe.

After her speech, Mrs. Obama worked the ropeline, greeting the attendees, who were overflowing with enthusiasm. Really, this was a lot like taking crowd shots at big concerts, except with older subjects, more cameras, more handshakes, more Secret Service agents, and fewer devil’s horns. My favorite shot is this one, though, taken with a long lens and the benefit of some catchflash from someone else’s camera. This was a seriously lucky shot - that catchflash makes the First Lady stand out in a sea of tungsten-lit haze. I don’t need no radio-triggered remote strobes when I can just use other people’s perfectly aimed flashes!

All told, this went pretty well other than a time or two that I got too close and was either shouldered aside by Secret Service agents or pulled back by Samantha. Oops. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” is always near the front of my brain, but this time around it probably shouldn’t have been.

After the jump, a few more photos from the event. There’s a small gallery here; I’ll be turning over a full set to Greater DC Cares within a few days. (They’re already using one of my shots - the second one above - as their main homepage image.) I documented the entire summit, not just the luncheon, but obviously the keynote speech was the big draw.

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There is nothing quite like taking thousands of dollars of camera gear into the front row of a Dillinger Escape Plan show, at a venue with no photo pit. I did this a few months ago at the Ottobar in Baltimore; last week I did it again, at a much smaller venue, the Rock & Roll Hotel in DC. Even though the show was overall much tamer than the Ottobar, for me personally it was the opposite. The Ottobar has this weird niche carved out of the stage where I strategically placed myself and was largely sheltered from the madness in front of the stage. Rock & Roll Hotel has no such convenient niche and so I was definitely right in the middle of the madness this time around.

In February, Ben Weinman kicked me in the head once. Last week, I can’t remember how many times I got knocked around. The most potentially disastrous moment was at some point when vocalist Greg Puciato leapt over my head into the crowd (actually I think it was the moment at the 25 second mark in this video) and surfed back onto stage, tumbling head over heels and slamming my right arm, camera in hand, straight down into one of the stage monitors. Eh, no problem there. Towards the end of the set, somehow someone hit my flash really hard — I think it may have been guitarist Jeff Tuttle stage diving — and broke off a piece of the battery compartment door. The compartment door snapped off, the batteries went flying and the flash was out of commission for the rest of the show (which was really pretty much just half of one song, so no big deal).

But what was really amazing is how well my photos turned out despite my lens getting absolutely filthy. I was shooting with my 12-24/4 DX lens on my D700, which meant I couldn’t use a filter or lens hood or the vignetting would be much worse than it already is (as it is, the lens is usable at 18mm and up, but no wider). The front element of the lens definitely took some contact, mostly from water and sweaty shirts. I took a look at it after the show and it was all smudged to hell. Combined with the thick fog that hung in the air thanks to the band’s fog machine and the evaporating sweat that quickly turned the place into a sauna (Puciato apparently said afterwards that it was one of the top 10 hottest, temperature-wise, shows that he has ever played), I’m amazed that I was able to eke enough contrast out of any of my shots.

Anyway, flash was mandatory given not only the fast action but also the extensive backlighting that DEP set up, and the fact that much of the action was taking place offstage and in the crowd. Normally I like to get my flash off-camera, but I wanted to have one hand free so that I could brace myself against the crowd, so on-camera flash was the name of the game. I was surprised with how happy I was with the end results.

Anyway. DEP is probably the only band that I would try to shoot literally every single time they come around my neck of the woods. Every touring band has a formulaic live show to some extent, by necessity, but DEP is one of the few bands where you really, really don’t know what the fuck is going to happen on any given night. Case in point: their show at Bonnaroo yesterday, in which I was happy to hear they surprised the hell out of some innocents who had no idea what to expect. Good times!

Full set is here and full of awesome!

Last night I banged out some quality shots at the Decemberists and Andrew Bird sets at Merriweather Post Pavilion. The lighting was glorious. Decent amounts of white frontlighting and a beautifully colorful backdrop, all bright enough to get shutter speeds well over 1/160 at f/2.8, ISO 1600. Big venue and big stage, so I did the dual-body thing, with my D300 and 17-55/2.8 alongside my D700 and 80-200/2.8. Interestingly, the nature of the two bands meant that I used these two cameras in opposite amounts for each set. For Andrew Bird’s expressive but relatively compact stage presence, I liked framing tight on Bird himself (above is an extreme example), and used my D700 about twice as much as the D300. For the Decemberists, the epic lighting and grandiose rock-star flailing compelled me to go wide (as below), using the D300 twice as much as the D700. I found it interesting that I shifted compositional styles to fit the performances without even consciously thinking about it.

A Merriweather staff member told me I could shoot three songs of each band, and when I asked if I could continue shooting from outside the pit after three, he said yes, “just don’t get in people’s way.” That was sweet. Except the rest of the staff didn’t get the same memo. I was questioned repeatedly, and although invoking the staffer I’d originally spoken with held off the first three security team members from kicking me out, eventually (after I’d gotten a couple shots of Shara Worden doing her thing) I left on my own volition to join my friends on the lawn. It remains unclear to me what the actual “correct” policy was.

Here’s the full Decemberists/Andrew Bird set.

On the other hand, when I shot Opeth (above) and Enslaved at the 9:30 Club a couple weeks ago, the “correct” policy was very clear - and was not followed. I was supposed to get two songs for each band, which was reasonable because both these bands play quite long songs (especially Opeth). Unfortunately, the length of Opeth’s songs got the 9:30 Club security confused, or at least one of them, who told me after the first song, “Heir Apparent,” that my two songs were up and I had to exit the pit. There wasn’t really anything I could do but insist he was wrong but leave anyway. Bummer. I got some decent stuff during that one song, but would really have loved another because I was getting a lot of silhouettes and the frontlight ramped up during the second song. At least Enslaved was fun to shoot and the show itself was solid. And I just can’t get enough of these metal show crowd shots:

Here’s the full set.

Sorry, that’s me talking in marketing jargon. Above is a Drobo, which is sold as “the world’s first data storage robot” or some nonsense like that. It’s not a freaking robot. It’s a 4-bay hard drive enclosure that has a particularly clever RAID-like data striping/mirroring implementation built in. As far as I can tell it’s something like RAID 5, but it’s smart enough to be able to handle non-identical (in size, spec or brand) hard drives and changes its strategy based on the number and size of the drives it has to work with. Right now I have two 1.5 terabyte Western Digital Caviar Green drives installed in my Drobo, so basically all it’s doing (as far as I can tell) is a simple RAID 1 mirroring strategy. If I were to add a third or fourth drive, its strategy would change to something more sophisticated. The real amazing thing is that drives are hot-swappable while you work - as long as you have more than one drive installed, you can literally pull one out and still be able to access all your data with no interruption.

Installing and uninstalling drives is a snap, too - no cables to play with, just take a 3.5″ SATA hard drive and slide it into a slot. Bingo. The ease of use of this thing is amazing, and it’s nice to know that my photos are backed up on a secure device that can withstand the failure of a hard drive (but not two at once). I was running out of space for all my photos, and this seemed like a much easier, and ultimately cheaper, solution than building a file server or an external RAID array. What’s more, it’s easily expandable, as I still have two open bays and I can always swap out older, smaller drives with newer, larger ones. But I should be good to go for a year or so.

This thing is apparently very, very, very, very, very, very popular among photographers.

Here is the timeline for my Artomatic wall, pictured above. Keep in mind the final day for installation was this past Tuesday, May 26.

• Monday, May 18: ordered my prints from White House Custom Colour
• Wednesday, May 20: received my prints from WHCC
• Thursday, May 21: dropped off my prints to get framed at Apex Moulding
• Friday, May 22: prints ready for pickup
• Saturday, May 23: picked up my framed prints, then spent all weekend at Maryland Deathfest
• Monday, May 25, 12pm-5pm: did a Gallery Manager shift
• Monday, May 25, 6pm-9pm: painted my wall, hung my lights, arranged and hung my photos

Yes, that’s right… in the space of one week, I ordered my prints and had them framed. In the space of 3 hours, I went from a blank wood wall to the completed one you see above. I wasn’t going to bother painting - figured I needed a coat of primer plus two coats of paint, and there was no way I had time for that nonsense - but the guys doing the wall next to mine told me they’d only used one coat of paint, no primer. And theirs looked great. So I found some nice dark gray paint at Artomatic’s awesome communal paint stash, went home and got the same rollers, brush, blue tape and drop cloth that I used last year (plus the same lights, power strip, name plate, etc etc), and had at it. When it was barely dry, I went ahead and put up my lights and hung my photos.

It went quickly but I’d recommend procrastinating a little less than I did :) I’m lucky enough to have a ridiculously fast printer and framer - WHCC ships everything by 2-day mail, and Apex Moulding is just amazing with their turnaround, presumably because they’re a wholesale place with a different business model from your average frame shop.

Artomatic opens this Friday, and it’s going to be a good one this year. I can’t vouch for the quality of any of the art, of course, but it’s a great space and there are some very interesting things in the works. My wall is on the ninth floor on the east side of the building. I’ll miss the opening weekend, sadly, but I hope to spend a decent amount of time in the building until the show is over. (Free wireless internet!)

I shot 30+ bands and 4 to 5 thousand photos this weekend at Maryland Deathfest. Photos being processed slowly, I have to finish up the wedding photos from a couple weeks ago as well. I’ll post good ones here sporadically, but above is me (in the red shirt) at work in the pit with the vocalist from The Red Chord (black shirt facing the camera). Thanks to Aaron from Return to the Pit for taking and posting this and a gazillion other images in a split second. (Dude wrote a program to automatically process all his images, so unlike me, he posted all his photos the same day he took them. Meanwhile, I’m processing all my RAW files by hand. Hmm.)

There were tons of photogs at the fest, mostly from webzines and fan sites. They cut off press credentials over a month out, so I guess they were granting passes to most of those who asked until they hit their limit. Photogs got both pit and stage access on both festival stages (indoor and outdoor), which was sweet. We were limited to two songs for Bolt Thrower because of excessive amounts of bodies flying, but otherwise, no restrictions. It was a fucking blast and an incredibly well-run festival. More to come.

In the meantime, I posted my first of several posts about MDF at Black Plastic Bag.

Last year at VA States, I took some 3,000 photos and shared about 800 of them. This year, I took about 4,000 and am sharing about 1,200 of them. That’s a lot of Ultimate photos. They’re all here on my Zenfolio site. Zenfolio allows me to sell prints online (through Mpix - I don’t have to do any printing or shipping myself) as well as digital downloads. I’m very happy with it, will write more in the future.

I’ll also comment a bit more about my experience shooting this tournament, but I think I’ll do that sometime when it’s not 1am and I still have some work to do. For now, enjoy the photos.