Photos: Cobra Starship

Not only do Cobra Starship make “Good Girls Go Bad,” the dance-rock heroes can make a floor heave with the best of ‘em. Led by frontman Gabe Saporta, the Cobras closed out the night after performances by 3OH!3, Travie McCoy, and I Fight Dragons at the Uptown Theater.

Photographer’s Notes:

Fact: Cobra Starship like fbooming lights. This is good and bad. Good in that when the lights are on, they’re big and beautiful. The flipside is that it’s feast or famine, and the lighting is very short in duration, and almost always from the back or sides. The takeaway? Photographing Cobra Starship requires a little luck and a lot of patience.

Don’t be fooled by the above images – A photographer’s selects only tell one side of the story. If you want an idea of how the lighting for most of Cobra Starship’s set was, this should give you a pretty good idea:

However, despite any lighting challenges, Cobra Starship, and in particular frontman Gabe Saporta, are fantastic subjects with an undeniable energy on stage. Whatever the stage treatment, these guys always deliver an explosive show that’s a blast to shoot.

For this set, with only three songs to make it happen, I focused on Gabe Saporta for the majority of my shooting.

At the Uptown Theater, the stage setup was a little different than in past years, with a massive photo pit. The pit was as deep or deeper than most arena shows I’ve shot, with nearly three meters between the stage and the barricade. Of course, a little over a third of this space was taken up by a row of bass speakers at the center of the stage, which put a little distance between photographers and the band.

Tech Notes:

I shot this set mostly between ISO 3200 and 6400 at f/2.8 with the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 on the Nikon D3.

End Notes:

I photographed Cobra Starship back in 2008 on the Sassy Back Tour and again last year performing with Boys Like Girls on the Love Drunk Tour, and it’s great to see these guys achieving success over the last few years.

This shot ran in Alternative Press in the January 2009 issue profile for Cobra Starship from their Pop’s show on the Sassy Back Tour.

Big thanks to Kelly, Gabe, and everyone with Cobra Starship.

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About the author: Todd Owyoung is an internationally published music photographer specializing in concert photography and band portraits. He also grills a mean steak.

Contact Todd for image licensing and assignments wherever the rock show lives. You can also get in touch with Todd via Twitter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Music Photography and tagged with cobra starship, gabe saporta, gabriel saporta, live, music, music photography, photographer, too fast for love, tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.