Live Music

Shot two vastly different shows last week. Medeski Martin and Wood at the Westcott and Phish at the War Memorial. Medeski Martin and Wood was a pretty relaxed affair. No photographer babysitters, no PR people. Show up, shoot what you want, leave when you want. Contrast that with Phish … I shot 700 frames in 15 minutes, and I’m not allowed to post the photos here. Or on Flickr. Or anywhere other than thenewshouse.com. Call me old fashioned, but I’m a big fan of showing my work to as many people as possible.

One of the hardest things about shooting live music is the lighting. The rapidly changing, often colored lights can sometimes throw the meter for a loop. This was especially true for Phish. Their light shows tend to be more extravagant than just about anyone out there, and their lighting guy Chris Kuroda improvises right along with the band, so you never quite know what to expect. For Medeski Martin and Wood, I shot aperture priority, auto-ISO with center-weighted metering at -2.0 exposure compensation. I had the ISO set up for a minimum shutter speed around 1/80s, but I often hit the ISO ceiling first. Most of the pictures turned out well, and I was able to get a wide variety of images. We ended up running an overall and a cropped version of the upright bass above. See the article here.

For Phish, I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it was going to be hectic. I used roughly the same settings, but only set for -1.0 exposure compensation. When I got back to edit down the pictures, I was surprised to see how many frames I shot at ISO 200. There were several frames that were either completely white or completely black, because the lights were changing so quickly, but technically, most of my images were dead-on. A little toning, dodging, burning and they’re ready to publish.

One of the big (HUGE) things I forgot on the MMW show was ear protection. I normally keep a good set of earplugs in my kit, but between switching bags back and forth, and going to Sierra Leone, I apparently lost mine. I have a tendency to stand in front of the stacks when I shoot. My only saving grace was that the main speakers were elevated above the crowd, so I wasn’t getting directly blasted. But my ears were still ringing when I woke up the next morning. There was no way I was going to make the same mistake for Phish, so I ran up to guitar center Sunday afternoon and picked up a new pair. It was still loud, but manageable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 12:08 pm. It is filed under journalism, music, syracuse and tagged with medeski martin and wood, music, newshouse, oncenter, phish, syracuse, war memorial, westcott. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.