Day 5 - Live Music

A friend recently asked me what my favorite thing to photograph is. As I thought about it, I realized that other than taking pictures of my family, I love to photograph concerts and live music in small venues and dance performances. I enjoy the challenge of capturing the event and the challenge of the lighting situations. With that in mind, I took my 40d along to see a friend at a local pub last night. Since he plays from 9pm until 1am, I waited until midnight and started to take some photos knowing I wanted to use one on this blog. The lighting in this pub is minimal at best - a string of Christmas lights around the alcove where the singer is positioned, a few recessed lights behind the singer, lighting in a hall to the right and a few dim lights in the rest of the bar. Since the light was so low, I set my ISO at 3200 and went for it to get as high a shutter speed as possible. I wanted to test out my new 50mm 1.4 lens and play with hand holding it at low shutter speeds since it's heavier than the 50mm 1.8 lens that I'm used to. I also played with the monochrome picture style on some of the shots to see if I liked it at all. I like to shoot and color and convert to B&W myself but thought I'd give this a try. As far as post processing on these photos went, I did some minor noiseware adjustments on a few but mostly just left the grain and tried to embrace it. I generally upped the midtones a bit and added some screen layers and soft light layers at times. On some of the monochrome ones, I used a hue adjustment to add some warmth to the tones and I added some grunge overlays and borders. And here's my favorite of the night all grunged up ...

Date Taken: January 5, 2008
Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Lens: Canon 50mm 1.4
Exposure: 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture: f/1.4
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 3200
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire

If you're interested in the other photos, you can see the set over at Flickr.