March 11, 2009 – Performing on the Taste of Chaos Tour 2009, Pierce the Veil delivered an amped up set of pop-tinged post-hardcore, with Vic Fuentes’s high vocals sailing over the roiling layers thrown down by his bandmates.
Shooting Notes:
Having shot the first two openers for this tour with available light, I decided to take matters into my own hands for Pierce the Veil’s set. Yes, I broke out the Nikon SB-900 and got down to business.
I shot with the built-in bounce card out and the flash angled to 45º, with flash metering set to roughly TTL at -2.0EV. Exposure for the ambient light was set between ISO 1600 and 3200 at roughly f/2.8 with a range of shutter speeds.
Why ask flash, you might ask? Here’s why:
The above shot is a reference made without flash while the stage was lit with a deep red wash.
I shot this set with the Nikon D3 and Nikon D700 with the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 and Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8, respectively. The latter came in handy primarily for tighter shots of singer Vic Fuentes, as well as the obligatory snap of the band’s drummer, Mike Fuentes.
The setup for this set was one of the more challenging ones, due to the fact that Jaime Preciado and Tony Perry played on ego risers, putting them about two feet above the already five-foot stage.
Vic Fuentes, on the other hand, was both easy and hard as a subject. Due to his vocal duties, the singer stayed glued to the mic for much of the first three songs. The downside to this was working the angles around the microphone and its stand, which came in from the frontman’s left.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Music Photography and tagged with 2009, bring me the horizon, flash, images, live, metal, Music Photography, nikon, photography, pierce the veil, post-hardcore, punk, screamo, taste of chaos, thursday, toc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Pierce the Veil – sometimes you just gotta bounce that flash: http://is.gd/o6VF
Oh man that looks awesome, flash or not. I see a whole tutorial on that hehe. Nice work. Makes me feel a little better bringing it to shows once in a while
Hey Rene,
Thanks for the comment. I definitely plan to write a tutorial on the use of flash at concerts, both for on-camera and wireless remote setups. Flash is just another tool at the disposable of the concert photographer. It’s not inherently good or bad.
So did they actually formally allow you to use a flash or was this purely an act of desperation?
I did what was right for the last three bands.
I normally don’t post on these twice, but I must say I am digging the colors, would you be able to have gotten them so vibrant without the flash ?
Hi Rene, thanks for the follow-up. The richness of the colors is not due to the flash itself, but it is a result of the exposure that the addition made possible in some respect. To put it another way, exposure for the subjects without flash would have changed the rendering of the background.
Using flash, it’s possible to essentially set the exposure for the background lighting and the subject independently from one another.
Pierce the Veil – sometimes you just gotta bounce that flash: http://is.gd/o6VF
Just curious……..we you using on camera flash for this show?
On-camera flash, but not built-in.
Curious to know what shutter speeds were used with the flash in combination with those high isos
Hi Natasha,
The range of shutter speeds in these shots ranged from 1/40 to 1/250.
Even though the flash obviously brought out more detail the shot I enjoy more than any other is the example of the one you shot without the use of the flash. It has more emotion than any other in my opinion and it expresses the feeling of what it is like to be at a concert. Of course I understand the physical limitations of a camera and your client’s demands might make you use flash, I just prefer no flash. Still good work as always.
Hi Zach, thanks for the feedback. You raise an interesting point.
The one shot posted without flash does have a lot of “mood” (arguably, that’s its biggest strength), but mood alone isn’t enough, especially for a set of images. I think there’s an interesting duality between a precise description of the event as the audience saw it and an editorialized version that might reveal other unseen or obscured aspects of the show. As concert photographers, there’s an inherent element of projection on our part on the process of documenting or representing performance.
Who and what we choose to capture is one part of this process, just as is how we choose to render those subjects. Timing, composition, and editing are all elements there. So are exposure and lighting.
Excellent use of the flash Tod, cheers!
Mmm… it’s shot like the first two that make concert photography tasty. I love how the light is split on the first.. those photos are always a catch. The lighting on his hair in the second, complemented with some white light from the flash on front makes for an interesting photo as well. I loves it.
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Amazing photographs, Todd! I always love the colours in your shots. I wonder, are those lights actually that awesome in the venues that you shoot, or do you sometimes add/intensify them in photoshop? If you don’t mind me asking.
Hey Tanya, thanks! I don’t do anything to boost color in post-processing in terms of saturation or anything like that.
Quite honestly, I don’t really have time to tweak my shots too much, so the general look of my shots is pretty much out of camera. What I do in RAW conversion is tweak exposure or white balance to suit my taste, but other than that, it’s pretty vanilla. I shoot with my cameras on the standard image settings about 99% of the time.
Hope this answers your question.
PS: I should add that the intensity of the color of the backgrounds here is entirely due to the exposure. And in that regard, they were also affected by flash, in that flash gave me the freedom to exposure for the subject independent of the background.
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