Before / After - Orville Peck

Drag

THE STORY

rville Peck is an artist who I've been wanting to see and photograph since Pony came out in 2019. Between the pandemic and tour cancellation last year for mental health reasons, more than 5 years later, I still hadn't managed it. Last night that changed!

When I arrived at the Brady Music Center to pick up my photo pass, I was informed that in addition to photographing the first three songs from the photo pit, we were allowed to photograph the rest of the show from anywhere in the house. As a huge fan, this was a major bonus. Being able to shoot from the house after the first three I really feel helps give a better idea what the show was like. You can see the stage from different views and incorporate the crowd in the coverage as well as wide angle shots that show the full stage setup.

Photographing artists with large hats is always a challenge as most of the time, they cast their face in dark shadows. For Orville’s show, the light was pretty manageable, so the biggest challenge was to pick my spots and wait for moments where his face was in view. After a while of doing this, you get pretty good at anticipating lighting changes and body movements based upon the dynamics of the music and use that to give the best chance to be in the right place at the right time with the right settings.

THE EDIT

I started by applying my base color preset, which increases contrast, lower black levels significantly, and add a bit of clarity and dehaze along with some smaller adjustments to the shadows and highlights. With that preset on, I tried to correct the white balance, but as sometimes happens, there wasn’t enough adjustability to get to the natural skin tone that I was aiming for. With the temperature at the warmest (yellowest) and the tint at the greenest end of the spectrums, the skin still looked bluish pink.

The first step I take when I need further adjustment than I can achieve with white balance is the hue/saturation/luminance sliders. This can often take some experimentation to get used to using, but is super powerful. I pushed the magenta hue fully to the red end of the slider then moved on to the saturation sliders. In order to pull out some of the problematic hues, I pulled back the purple and magenta each about halfway. With those colors desaturated bit, I brought some color back by adding a bit more warmth to the photo using the color grading of the highlights, midtowns, and shadows, to enhance the red and orange tones until I was satisfied with the skin tone. I’m pleased with how it turned out!