The Rules of Another Small World | M. Ostermeier | Tench Recordings

I recently licensed a few photographs to Tench Recordings for the latest CD release by M. Ostermeier “The Rules of Another Small World”. I received a few copies of the CD in the mail last week, which you can see in the quick snap above. The music is best described as otherworldly – minimalist soundscapes that combine elements of modern classical, jazz, ambient and lounge genres. If that’s your thing, then by all means check out the Tench recordings webpage or visit M. Ostermeier’s Facebook page. You can hear samples of the tracks at both locations. The CD will ship on May 10th with pre-orders going out on April 26th.

Bob Log III performing live at The Wall, Taipei, Taiwan.

Robert Knight is one of the most respected and widely published photographers in the music industry. From being one of the first to photograph Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin’s first US show to the last to photograph Stevie Ray Vaughan, he’s covered some of the great musicians of the past 40+ years. He is known for only shooting artists whose music he connects with, and there have been a number of big-name acts he’s turned down because he wasn’t into. You could say that if there’s no connection between photographer and subject then it’s not a photograph, it’s a photocopy.

I always had a problem with photographers who were more important than the people they took pictures of.

So begins this ten minute interview that is reproduced below, from the team at Behind The Hype. Midway through he talks about the passion of artists and although he’s discussing musicians, what he says is directly relevant to photographers. Some are born and there’s nothing else they can do.

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Clubbers in a Taipei nightclub.

Nightclub photography offers a series of challenges to the photographer but the rewards when successful images are created are worth it. When I was doing a lot of music photography, I occasionally ventured into the realm of nightclub photography but staying out until 4 or 5am on a regular basis is something that doesn’t interest me any more. Being the only sober person in a club at a time when most people are usually asleep takes a special kind of patience.

Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

One of the first hurdles to nightclub photography is simply access. A lot of nightclubs have some quite strict restrictions on photography and getting permission to take your camera in is the first issue you’ll face. Asking the club doesn’t usually work, as they’ll often have a work-for-hire photographer on deck. Your best bet is usually to get in touch with the promoters. Nightclubs will often have a different promoter responsible for the entertainment on different nights. Find out who that is – and it’ll usually say on the flyers – and approach them. If they’re a bigger, more established venture, then they’ll probably have someone already but party promoters seem to come and go pretty regularly so there’s always a chance you’ll get a gig through them. You may not get into the bigger clubs in the city but if you start with small parties midweek and keep at it, you’ll soon find yourself asked to cover an event in one of the bigger clubs. Another possible avenue is via the DJ. If you’ve got a friend who is a DJ, go along and photograph all their shows and as they get bigger gigs, you’ll be right alongside. It’d be great if people went to parties because of which photographer is there but they don’t, they go for the DJ, the event or the club itself.

Once you find yourself inside, how do you get the shot? If you’re lucky enough to get access to one of the bigger superclubs, you’ll probably find a spectacular light show that you can use to your advantage. Lasers can add a real sense of being there to your photos and room strobes offer lots of light if you get the timing right. Both are common elements of lighting in larger clubs and both are usually programmed to a particular pattern that you can learn to anticipate.

In general however, nightclubs are pretty dark places. A fast, wide zoom, such as a 16-35mm f2.8 makes for a good versatile nightclub lens. If you shoot with two bodies, then you might be better off with a couple of fast primes. Use your wider apertures where possible to blur out messy backgrounds. You’re almost always going to have to work with flash. The absolute worst thing you can do is use a pop-up flash on the camera and the second worst is using a hotshoe flash on camera. You’ve got to get it off camera. At a minimum, use a Stroboframe bracket but if you can get the speedlight even further away, it’ll make for much better images. Try holding the camera in your right hand and the flash in your left, extended as far as possible. Use an off camera show cord or something like the ST-E2 transmitter to fire the flash. There’s no real need to have Pocket Wizards or the like in a nightclub. Work your flash exposure compensation to adjust the output and remember that aperture controls the flash and shutter speed the ambient. There’ll likely be difficulties with the auto-focus at times due to the darkness, so make use of the AF assist beam in the transmitter or speedlight.

Most people will be happy for their photo to be taken but occasionally you’ll come across someone who isn’t. If that’s the case, just walk away. There’ll be plenty of other people who are willing subjects. Carry a stack of business cards or some other identifier and give them out to people that you take pictures of. Tell them that you’ll be putting the photos on your website and invite them to check them out. You may find you get a few inquiries about prints or photos for Facebook, so you could make a bit of additional money from the night.

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Earthcore

Music festivals offer a great opportunity for photographers to get some shots of bands, performers and other crowd members. Unlike a lot of indoor concerts, outdoor festivals often have less restrictions placed on camera gear, although you’ll still probably need accreditation and a media pass to bring in a full kit. However with pocket cameras providing high quality images these days, you will still have plenty of opportunities for good shots even if you can’t take in a full DSLR kit. They also have the advantage of being easy to stash in your pocket or a small bag for times when you just have to dance. Check with the organisers ahead of time for what you can and can’t take with you. Once inside, here are a few tips to get you going.

• Shoot the smaller acts. If the Foo Fighters or Lady Gaga or someone is headlining, you’re probably not going to get anywhere near the stage, so don’t even bother trying to photograph the,. Instead, focus on the smaller acts playing on side stages and the like. These will often have sparse crowds and maybe even no photo pit, so you can get up close and get some more intimate photographs.
• Shoot the crowd. Half the fun of a music festival is the crowd. You could spend your entire day just taking photographs of festival attendees and not the performers and you’d come away with a good series of images. Particularly if it’s rainy and muddy.
• Prepare for the weather. Festivals often seem to attract bad weather and mud. Lots of mud. Think Woodstock or every other year at Glastonbury. Have some kind of protection for your camera in the event of rain.
• Don’t forget the stalls and vendors. Lots of great opportunities for photos in the market areas .
• If shooting people under the sun, use a bit of fill flash to ease any shadows, especially around the eyes.
• Never leave your gear with anyone else. It doesn’t matter how close you are to someone, if you take camera gear with you, it’s your responsibility. It’s not fair to your friends to make them look after your gear.
• Research ahead of time. Get online and search out some images from previous years at the same location. You’ll get an idea of what’s possible and what’s not.

Daniel Pearl Music Day

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Bob Log III performing live at The Wall, Taipei, Taiwan. Getting accurate white balance in a live music environment is often quite tricky.

My very first entry in this phototip series looked at creative white balance. A few people have written to me requesting a basic description of white balance, so here goes.

White balance is essentially the color temperature (in degrees Kelvin) and tint of light. A neutral white balance is what appears normal to the human eye and anything that deviates from this appears tinted. That’s not to say it’s wrong, far from it, just that it’s different.

When using film, it was normal to buy films specifically for different light sources (daylight, tungsten) or through the use of lens filters to adjust the light in some way. Digital cameras though greatly simplify and expand the options available to photographers. White balance can be either selected automatically by the camera; through a variety of standard settings (daylight, shade, cloudy, fluorescent, tungsten, flash); or by manually presetting it.

If you’re shooting in JPEG format, it’s extremely important to get your white balance settings correct in-camera before you shoot. This is not so important when working in RAW as you can set the white balance in the processing stage. Setting a manual white balance is good practice if you’re going to be shooting for a long time in continuous, unchanging light, or if you are working in some kind of mixed light that you can’t change or control. Your camera manual will have instructions for manually setting the white balance as the process differs from camera model to camera model.

As a bonus, for anyone who’s not familiar with Bob Log III, he’s quite a performer. Here’s a selection of images from the two performances of him that I’ve shot.

Music | Bob Log III – Images by Craig Ferguson

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Both as a personal exercise in creativity and as a theme for a competition, putting together a series of photographs that are based on the song titles on a favorite album is a lot of fun. There are a number of ways you can go about it, so let’s look at a few. They all start with choosing or being assigned an album to use as your theme.

• Spend a few hours shooting all images relating to the song titles.

• Go through your archives and find differing images that relate to the titles.

• In a group, divide the album up and shoot 2-3 “songs” each.

• Shoot the album as a project spanning a few weeks.

• Get really ambitious and try to work your way through Rolling Stone’s “Top 500 Albums” list.

For the examples here, I’ve chosen Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon”. Images are after the jump.

Speak To Me - popular Taipei mayor Hau Long-bin makes a speech.

Breathe - Tai chi in a Taipei park.

On The Run - 42km (26 miles) of pain, a runner about to complete a marathon.

Time - Taichung HSR Station.

Great Gig in the Sky - Pingxi Sky Lanterns

Money - ghost money stacked in a Taiwanese temple.

Us and Them - Barbed wire barricades to keep protestors away.

Any Color You Like - Choosing fabric in Taipei.

Brain Damage - drink too much and that's what you might get

Eclipse

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Taiwan indie singer Crowd Lu on stage. Lu won Best New Artist and Best Composer at the 2009 Golden Melody Awards in Taipei.

You have three songs. Sometimes two. No control over the lighting. So how do you get great shots during a live concert? Start out with your camera set to RAW, meter set to spot and white balance on auto and a fairly high ISO.

Before we continue, professional photographers as well as those who aspire to be shouldn’t miss out on portfolio consultant Selina Maitreya and her audio series The View From Here. It’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.

As you take your place in the photo pit, shoot a quick test shot. Spot meter the singer’s/guitarist’s face and shoot a test exposure based on that. Check the LCD screen image and histogram, watching out for blown highlights in the important areas (and what’s important will largely be up to you). Adjust as necessary, and lock the settings in. Shooting manual is easiest for consistency. As the stage lighting changes, make any adjustments necessary. Something like f2.8 and 1/250 is a good combination to start from.
That’ll keep you covered for your basic exposure. You’re going to want to decide on some settings in the first few seconds of your allotted three songs and try to avoid changing them too much. Each second spent changing settings is one less second shooting, and when you’re only in the pit for ten minutes, every second counts. When you do need to change settings, you need to know how to do it quickly. The photo pit is not the place to discover that the new model of camera you’re using has it’s ISO button in a different place than the old model. It is essential that you can change settings on the fly, without needing to look for the correct button. Practice at home in a dark room or with a blindfold first. Know exactly where each button is, and how to adjust be feel only. Decide on whether you want to set your camera to change in full stops, ½ stops or 1/3 stops and make this consistent with all your bodies.

View of the crowd from the side of the photo pit at an Oasis concert.

Shoot a lot. Make sure you have plenty of memory cards and also that they are all preformatted and ready to go. Ensure that spare cards are easily accessible – you don’t have time to search through your bag to find a new card. I use a Black Rapid RS-5 strap that has a useful pocket that I can store spare cards in. I know exactly where they are and can pull them out instantly when necessary.

I’ll look at composition tips, dealing with stage lights and more in a future post.

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Music | Diplo – Images by Craig Ferguson

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, my grandparents took a trip to Britain. I remember they came back with lots of slides and it became a regular feature of trips to their place during school holidays and so forth to have a slide show. Even though I’d seen the photos numerous times, as a kid I was always keen to see them again.

Slideshows these days have evolved and we can now easily see them online everywhere, from news media to blogs, travel sites to You Tube. Putting them together can be as simple or as difficult as you like.

At the most basic level, a slideshow is a series of pictures automatically progressing to the next. From there you can move onto features such as adding transitions, captions, fades, animation, voiceovers and music. If you decide to add music to a slideshow, so remember to respect copyright – I have seen a lot of slideshows by both amateur and professional photographers that essentially contain pirated music.

The slideshow with this post is served automatically from my portfolio archive hosted at Photoshelter. Quick slideshows can be easily put together in Lightroom. In the past, I’ve used software such as Slideshow Pro, Proshow Gold, iMovie, Windows Moviemaker and more. There are plenty of other options available as well.

So give it a try. Select a series of photos, create a slideshow, share it via YouTube or Vimeo and share it with your friends.

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Shoot the audience.

As someone who makes part of my income from shooting live music I notice that one of the most common requests I get from bands and promoters is for crowd shots. In many ways, it’s in the audience that the popularity of a band and the quality of their music is most apparent.

I’m a person who loves almost all forms of music, has thousands of LP’s, CD’s and MP3 albums; and has been regularly supporting live music and DJs for close on two decades. Nothing is more disappointing to me than a crowd that doesn’t react to the guys on stage. Therefore, as a photographer, I always make sure I have one eye on the crowd in order to capture their reactions when a favorite song is played, a DJ drops a beat or a lead guitarist launches into a solo.

Quite often, the crowd are going to be moving as much as, if not more than, the band. You want to make sure you have a shutter speed fast enough to freeze that movement. In a dark club, that’s often not possible, so a flash bounced off the ceiling can work wonders.

Here in Taipei, most venues have an open camera policy. We don’t really get many international touring bands here which do have photo restrictions, so it’s quite easy for most people to take a camera along and get some photos. For those of you who don’t have the advantage of open camera policy in your local live venues, you might be able to go out on a quiet night midweek and be able to take a camera with you, or you could make friends with someone in a band and have them okay it with the club management. No matter which approach you take, make sure you turn your camera on the crowd for a change.

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Rock n roll band The Deadly Vibes open the Rock N Roll Circus at VU Livehouse, Ximending, Taipei, Taiwan.

This past weekend saw Taiwan’s favorite dirty rock and roll band The Deadly Vibes bring the RockNRoll Circus back to town. With two shows, one on Friday in Taichung and one on Saturday in Taipei, it was a much anticipated event. They got me in to shoot their set at the VU Livehouse in Ximending on Saturday and it was the usual down and dirty, gritty rock that they are renowned for. Words can’t really explain what they’re like but maybe a few pictures can. If you’re not familiar with them, check them out at their Myspace link above. The images were all shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, 17-40mm f4L lens and a 580exII speedlight equipped with a Honl 1/4″ gridspot.

Rock n roll band The Deadly Vibes open the Rock N Roll Circus at VU Livehouse, Ximending, Taipei, Taiwan.

Rock n roll band The Deadly Vibes open the Rock N Roll Circus at VU Livehouse, Ximending, Taipei, Taiwan.

Rock n roll band The Deadly Vibes open the Rock N Roll Circus at VU Livehouse, Ximending, Taipei, Taiwan.

Rock n roll band The Deadly Vibes open the Rock N Roll Circus at VU Livehouse, Ximending, Taipei, Taiwan.