Before / After - Bush

Drag

THE STORY

hirteen years into my concert photography career, I rarely see a lineup with three bands I've never seen before, let alone photographed. But that's exactly what happened last night with Bush, Jerry Cantrell (of Alice in Chains), and Candlebox. As someone whose adolescence was smack dab in the middle of the 90s, this was a heck of a bill!

At most shows, there are varying amounts of light on different parts of the stage. This keeps us concert photographers on our toes as we aim our lenses around at the band members, shuffling settings as we do. I’ve mentioned in previos Behind The Edit stories that I typically expose for band member in the darkest part of the stage and set my ISO as low as I can while keeping my aperture at f4.0 or higher and my shutterspeed no slower than 1/250th of a second. Then when I pan to a brighter part of the stage I just roll my shutter speed faster to accomodate for the additional light.

I even go as far as memorizing how many clicks on my shutterspeed dial to go between the various lighting cues, allowing me to quickly and confidently adjust on the fly without removing my camera from my eye. Every moment where i’m reviewing and image and checking/adjusting settings is a moment where my camera isn’t pointed in the direction of the band, potentially missing out on an amazing moment like a jump or a kick, etc.

For Bush, drummer took the stage first for a dramatic entrance with some really cool lighting cues before we was then joined by frontman, Gavin Rossdale and the rest of the band. When Gavin stepped up to the mic, the white light that was on him was so much brighter than any other light on stage that I spent the better part of the first song just trying to figure out settings where I could quickly switch from photographing him to one of the other band members that was not in the super bright lights.

I eventually got my act together and was able to settle in to focus on capturing the show rather than my settings. Maybe it’s my imagination, but if you look at all of the photos I took during the set, I feel like you can see how my approach shooting settles down as I find my footing. At first, it was frantic, with little thought put into composition or choosing my moments. I just aimed and clicked like a mad man as I made adjustments after each snap. As I got closer to my ideal settings for the challenging light, I began picking my moments. Not just clicking like mad, but waiting for the perfect moment so snap the photo. My composition also improved, leaving look-space on the photos, and weighting the image with intention.

This image was toward the end of my figuring it out period of the shoot. The composition isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough. If I could do it over again, I’d have him more weighted to the left of the frame. I could crop it, but there’s something about not making every image perfectly follow the rule of thirds that keeps a gallery interesting. If I compose every shot following the same rules, then it would all get a little boring. So here’s to the chaos of an unexpectedly challenging shoot that resulted in some photos I’m really happy with!

THE EDIT

As with most edits, I start with applying my base color preset to see how close it gets me to the result I’m looking for. In this case, it was in the ball park, but needed a few small tweaks. First, the white balance and tint were adjusted to get the skin tone as close to natural as I could get on the face. With the mixed lighting where his arm extends into a different color light, I used a graduated filter in Lightroom to bring the white balance closer, but ultimately, they were so different that without more doctoring than I feel comfortable with, this was as good as I could get.

I lowered the highlights to take make the background not as distracting from the subject then a few subtle pushes of the black levels, clarity and dehaze before calling it and moving on to the next image.

I realize that the last few of these Behind The Edit posts have been light on details because the preset has gotten me pretty close to the final edit. So, in the near future, I’m going to be digging into my archive to re-edit some old images from scratch, no presets allowed. Stay tuned for those posts and possibly even some youtube videos, sharing my process!