Always be open to challenging yourself.
As photographers we must set ourselves up for success, but a lot of the time we honestly have no clue how to do that. How can we prepare? We can prepare by putting ourselves in situations that are less than ideal shooting wise. We need to versify ourselves in different types of shooting situations and environments. There won’t always be a bright crisp beautiful day to capture events. Especially for us that shoot horse shows and events. I am always signing myself up for the craziest shoots because personally I feel like that is what helps me grow as a photographer. That is exactly what the House of Blues in Dallas did for me. It was a CHALLENGE and I loved it.
The stage was very dark and all they had was yellow lights on the stage which produced yellow and orange tones on the skin and even made some skin tones a dark green. The lights shined a harsh bright light on the singers since they were the closest to the lights. The drummers and the musicians on the guitars were left with a very spotty dingy light. You couldn’t use a flash at this event, and I couldn’t just step out in front of the audience and block off the show. To make things even more challenging the shooting space was limited to one little five-foot section on the side of the stage, the lights were not great to work with, and it’s fast paced, not to mention all the musicians are spaced out on the stage. Tons of components to make up for a disaster. Thanks to my powerhouse of camera and my 70-200mm lens my images turned out great. I got some amazing detail shots from this event.
I had to play with my settings for about 20 minutes just trying to figure out whether I wanted to jack up my ISO and leave my camera’s aperture as low as possible or send my ISO into high heaven with a deeper depth of field and pray my denoise software could bring it back up and smooth it out in post (which it did). I went back and forth between those two options. I used a low shutter speed for these such as 1/400, 1/200. Keep in mind my gear is heavy, and I didn’t have a tripod or a monopod, so I did have to balance myself as best as I could to keep that shutter speed low, which allows for more light. I’m not sure if you’ve ever shot with a 70-200mm but they are heavy, like toddler throwing a tantrum, heavy. No matter how much it moves and tries to wiggle out of your hand you just can’t because then your images will have motion blur. We do not want that!
This show helped restore my confidence when it comes to knowing my camera’s capabilities and really pushing the limits to see how it could do. These images are in manual mode, the settings I used the most were ( 1/400, f3.2, ISO 8,000 & 1/300, 3.5mm, ISO 3,200.)
