Before / Foxy Shazam

Drag

THE STORY

after so many years spent playing in bands and working in the service industry, I have spent more than my fair share of New Years Eves playing or working in a bar. Now that I'm not a working musician or bar employee, I always look forward to being able to actually hang out with my friends in New Years Eve, so I've avoided shooting shows on that day as well. Until this year.

Seeing a Foxy Shazam show is an experience to behold. Lead singer, Eric Nally’s stage moves are simultaneously spontaneous and precise as he spins, summersaults and works the microphone stand like drum major commanding the rest of the band. While it’s always fun to photograph a band that really puts their all into the stage show, it’s not easy. There’s so much activity happening on every corner of the stage that you always feel like you’re always missing something. All of the fast motion on stage and the constantly changing lights made it a stressful few songs in pit.

As with all shows, I set my ISO first to the lowest I can get a reasonable photo with, then I spent the rest of the set adjusting my shutter speed as the lights went from dark to very bright. I even had to shoot part of the show with my aperture at f2.8, which is wider than I prefer as it can lead to too shallow of depth of field.

THE EDIT

This was a fairly straight-forward edit. First, I used my regular preset for color photos. As usual my first step is to try to get skin tones looking as normal as possible, so I tweaked the white balance to get it close. The dark parts of the stage in the background were looking a little washed out and grey, is I lowered the black levels pretty significantly, the shadows a tad and increased the dehaze, clarity and texture to darken those up without losing the details in the band members. The last thing I did was some split-toning to give the highlights and shadows more interesting colors.