Jason Adamo @ Black Flower – Jan 8, 2009, originally uploaded by viridari.

I did my first live music shoot last week. The music was great, the beer was fantastic, and it was a lot of fun capturing these images of Jason Adamo’s band rocking the Black Flower last Thursday night.

My digital camera wouldn’t have pulled this off. The light in the Black Flower is quite dim, and the performers are lit with red-gelled lights that necessitated the use of a very fast film. In this case, I used Ilford Delta 3200 Professional shot at EI 3200. The camera was nothing special, just a Canon EOS Rebel G that I picked up very cheaply on eBay, coupled with a fast 50mm f/1.8 prime lens.

Not being a big fan of motion blur, I tried to keep the shutter speed at 1/90 or faster which necessitated wide apertures most of the night.

Jason and his band were very photographer-friendly and were very enthusiastic about having a photographer come out to shoot them. Doubly so when they found out that I was working in black & white film!

The Black Flower crew was also great, and I’m sure I’ll be going back there again and again (if for no other reason because they have a fantastic selection of craft brewed beers!)

irishmage, originally uploaded by viridari.

The same principles that applied to my previous post, about shooting in pub, works well in other situations where you have low ambient light. This was shot a few hours ago in a local coffee shop.

I exposed for the background, but dropped it down 1 stop from a perfect exposure. Then I set my E-TTL flash to sync on the rear curtain. The flash was bounced off of the wall behind me. I focused on my subject, composed the shot to my liking, and BAM!

The final image really conveys well the ambiance of the room but the subject is pretty well lit despite the face that he was actually sitting in a fairly dark spot.