Before / After - Stephen Wilson Jr.

Drag

THE STORY

hings have been slow this winter. Between not many shows happening, being busy with the day job and a handful of photo pass requests denied, it's been almost 3 months since my last show. Not counting covid, that's the longest I've gone since 2012 .

So, getting back behind the camera was a blast, but came with a bit of trepidation. After three months, would I still be quick with my settings changes or as good at finding the right angles at the right time? While there were a few moments where I realized that I had missed things, I was really pleased with the outcome overall.

Bogart’s photo pit is huge and the typically have plenty of light. For this Stephen Wilson Jr. concert, the light tended toward reddish pink as the dominant hue, which makes sense since it’s the predominant color in the album design of his most recent release, Son of Dad.

THE EDIT

I broke from my typical workflow for this edit. I recently got a new computer and realized when I went to edit, that I hadn’t transferred my saved edit presets to the new Lightroom install. Instead of getting the old computer out, I decided I would just edit the photo from scratch and not use any presets.

After so many years of using presets, it is probably a good idea to edit some photos from scratch from time to time to make sure my skills stay sharp and that I’m on top of any new features in Lightroom. The first thing I did was boost my contrast, because I still really love very contrasty images and I feel like it’s one of the hallmarks of my style. I can’t take any credit at all for the idea, as I have spent the majority of the last 14 years trying to emulate the vibe of Anton Corbijn.

With the contrast boosted, I then adjusted the white balance to be a bit cooler and the tint to be a bit more green to account for the amount of reds and pinks in the image and to get the skin tone more nature looking. Next I lowered the black levels about halfway to really make the dark areas go the photo a rich, inky black. At this point, the photo looks pretty dark and kinda flat, so now we need to bring out the details.

One of the reasons that concert photos can have that flat look is because of the fog on stage that kinda makes everything look a bit hazy. When that happens, the dehire tool in Lightroom is your best friend. But, I often use the dehire even when there’s not much haze at all because I like the way it boosts low frequency contrast and saturates the colors without affecting the highlights.

On this photo, I pushed it pretty far to really make the image pop. I was still looking for a little more detail and texture in the image, so I boosted the clarity and texture sliders to bring back in the skin texture and really show off the wear on the guitar. Lastly I ran it through Lightroom’s Denoise to clean it up a bit, careful not to overdo it and to retain a little bit of grain to keep it looking natural.