So I've now had the chance to test my camera out in a full lit room with moving children, and a gentleman who could out pose a rock. My next challenge was to take photographs of a rock band performing live at a venue. My last camera suffered from high noise (that's those speckled coloured dots that appear) and even at the high ISO range (the amount of light that is let through to the camera's exposure sensor) it still couldn;t handle fast shutter speeds. This meant if someone moved a fraction to fast, it left a blurred trail.
So here is a picture from my old Fuji FinePix bridge camera. This is one of the better photos, and with some simple editing the noise was reduced to give it a nice smooth look. But it does lack some definition in the subject. but this might have to do with me shooting it from 15 meters away! But, at least the stage was lit up like a chirstmas tree!
This next photo was taken at a completely different venue, it had nice dark moody lighting, great for moshing in the dark... terrible for taking photos and hoping to achieve anything usable... or so I thought. This was the first time I had used the RAW setting to get the best potential... this meant that when I edited the photo I could adjust the colour and luminosity before converting the file into a JPG. So by playing around with the light curve I was able to give the photo a comic art sort of look, which means that the JPG is unedited... get that through your brains! (With the exception of me adding a border this photo has not been manipulated since it was converted from the RAW file). Still unsure about RAW, open a new tab and google it! The above photo was also taken in B&W at the same time in JPG mode on the camera.
Again I had gone for the gritty comic book art look, it worked only on some of the photos, there still had to be the correct amount of light and a decent enough shot to make it work still. Because of the stage lights I ended up with 3 distinct colours come through.
Now, the above photo was already a JPG from the time the photo was taken by the camera. The great thing about B&W images is you can go further with the whole contrast and sharpness, it doesn't matter if you end up with a bit of noise, it makes it look more gritty! But here I've gone the other way, in my program Photoscape I have the option to add bloom effect, this is where the image is blurred slightly and the light is increased, making the whole image appear softer. I see so many times from photos of live performances of just the band memebers, so let's take some time to admire the beauty of the instruments they use too huh?
When it's dark, and moody, with lots of high contrast (whole fade of shades from white to black set against each other), then Sepia or Black & White is king. Colour tones work very differently in these settings as you;re move worried about getting the correct amount of light on the subject rather than the colour that you see (ie.. green skin would just look weird, but if you make the skin green in black and white of sepia instead, it actually helps make the skin tones look more subtle and soft).
Here we have the same chappy as in the top photo, now appart from the obvious colour differences, what else can you tell me that really stands out from this photo to the one far above? Try to bare in mind the first photo had enough lighting to see from out of space, where here it was full of colours that shone from the sides only.
Anyone interesting in hearing this band play can find IRIS's (In Retrospect I See)
website here. They've commissioned me to do a proper photo shoot at some point so keep an eye out for that!
