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It was time to update the PKK photos with "new" band members since the last time I shot these guys. So ... I donned my "official photographer hat" at Saturday night's performance for friends and family in Ajax, ON
Here are a few of my final selects that will be provided to the band for promo materials.
Those that follow the blog will know that this type of photography is not the norm for me, but as with some of the family photography I do, I always manage to surprise myself and get some decent shots.
DJE
After last weekend's outing to RBG for some extreme close up flower photography, I had an opportunity to go and shoot a band during a studio recording session. The session was in Oshawa and because I arrived later, they had already set up and laid down base tracks for the 4 songs they were recording but I was still able to capture some of the session for the guys.
Here, John lays down a vocal track for Ocean Pearl.
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| vocals - in the booth |
For this shoot there were a number of challenges to getting some decent images in the recording studio setting. Space was limited, ligting was terrible for photogrpahy with incansescent bulbs, warm coloured wood surfaces and very low lighting levels. With the various booths
having double glass windows and doors for acoustic, I was shooting through at least two layers of glass for most of the shots and since reflection and glare were part of the ambiance of the location, I just went with it. This image of John in the vocal booth I think illustrates what I'm talking about and IMO the reflections bring a sense of the environment to the image.
DJE
Ed - In the Light II
There is a lot more to making a Black & White image from digital capture than simply setting the camera to "monochrome" and accepting what it gives you.
First off, shooting in RAW rather than jpeg gives me considerable latitude when processing the image. There are more than enough online tutorials available on this subject so I'll refrain from being redundant here. Suffice to say that I have been experimenting with some processing techniques and programs for my B&W images lately and decided to invest in some fantastic software that works with both Lightroom and Photoshop.
After installing NIK Sliver Efex Pro 2 for my B&W conversions, I was taking advantage of their online training where one tutorial used images of performing musicians to show what could be done. This gave me the idea to go back to some work I did with my cousin's band, PKK, where the strong colour cast of the stage lights was quite distracting in the colour images. The tutorial instructor was suggesting the use of Silver Efex to convert to B&W, removing colour altogether when stage lighting just can't be made to look "right".
I feel that this image of Ed, one of the band's guitarists and vocalists, is much improved with the use of a sepia monochrome conversion. I like the slight warmth retained by the sepia tone and how all but the highlights just fall into deep black background and enhance the soulful mood.
Here is the colour version of the original image for comparison.
DJE
