Moar Band photography

I got invited to this show for a band called Harsh Reality by one of their members. The show was at a place called District 202, a gathering place/hangout for GLBT youth. I tried out my new speedlites for the first time in a live band shooting situation. After fiddling a bit and finding my look, it came out pretty good. I was able to take photos at ISO 800 just like when I brought out the studio strobes at the Terminal Bar, only this time I didn't need to run them off wall current and worry about where to run cords. I was also able to use auto flash exposure rather than run them at a constant brightness, which was helpful because some areas of the stage were much closer to the flashes than the others and it would have been impossible to find a manual solution that didn't completely burn some areas but leave others in total darkness. I was even able to use the A and B slave groups with the ratio feature to dial in different looks without having to fiddle with the flashes themselves.

My only issue was that since the trigger works on infrared and requires line of sight, the triggering wasn't very reliable. I might have to get one of those Radiopoppers when they come out.

I can wait to try this out at bigger venues with better stage lighting... I never really wanted to blow away the ambient completely, but these dark venues leave me very little choice. You can see a bit of ambient peeking through in these photos, but if you look at the real venue these pictures look nothing at all like it. If I were at some place like the Fine Line, I could probably shoot more for the ambient and just use the speedlites to enhance the stage lighting by bringing up the key level while leaving the character of the ambient intact. I could also probably get away with shooting ISO 400.

In other news, I've had a rather exciting development in my life that I don't feel like sharing to the world at large quite yet, but can share with my friends... Ask me about it if you don't know.