There is an incred­i­ble place in Asheville called Isis that has Sun­day night jazz. For free! Amaz­ing food, great drinks — def­i­nitely a place to mark and remem­ber. Here are some pho­tos from a recent visit!

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Per­form­ers on stage are, by the nature of per­form­ing, pretty emo­tive peo­ple. Usu­ally cog­nizant of every look and motion, they are con­stantly build­ing up a pres­ence with their eyes and hands and lips and hair and clothes and so on and so on. That makes for engag­ing and excit­ing pho­tog­ra­phy — think of the time­less imagery of Jimi Hen­drix, Jimmy Page or James Brown (acci­den­tal allit­er­a­tion, what?). Even in the midst of organic and spon­ta­neous activ­ity, there is a con­stant per­sona pre­sented to the audience.

How­ever, with the right envi­ron­ment and patience, occa­sion­ally a pho­to­graph can be taken that catches a moment of quiet dis­trac­tion. Such as the pho­to­graph below.

Dis­tracted

Taken at the French Broad Brew­ery, this photo was one of a series and you can see the rest of the show here. But this one image stood out to me for a num­ber of rea­sons — I get a sense of soli­tude, maybe of inter­nal rehearsal, and ulti­mately a sense of calm. I’ll be hon­est — I really like this image. I like the color, the com­po­si­tion, the sub­ject. I like that it feels a lit­tle bit behind-the-stage-curtain. I really like that it does not look like a con­cert pho­to­graph I would nor­mally take.

How to get such a photo, and how to repro­duce? The tech­ni­cal spec’s are 1600ISO, 1/60 @ f/2. Canon 5Dmk2, 50mm f/1.4 lens. Stage light­ing (of which I had no con­trol). So we know it’s going to be a mod­er­ately grainy setup, and we know the DOF is pretty going to be pretty shal­low. And since the light­ing is com­ing from the stage lights, we can assume that it’s going to be a mish­mash of some red, yel­low and green­ish tones.

And all of which plays well with this “cur­tain for a back­drop” type of stage. If it wasn’t a top-notch craft brew­ery, you could expect PBR cans or per­haps cracked tum­blers of Old Crow for refresh­ments. For­tu­nately, the beer was deli­cious (ESB for me) and the glasses solid.

Any­way — the main thing you have to remem­ber with these sort of envi­ron­ments is to be alert. Dis­trac­tions between songs can lead to missed oppor­tun­ties. When the singer moves away from the mic, don’t go back to the beer. Fol­low her with your cam­era and watch what’s going on. Is she get­ting some­thing out of her gui­tar case? Is she talk­ing to some­one off-stage? Is she, as in this case, chang­ing instru­ments entirely? All of these open up the win­dow for a photo that’s a bit more involved, a bit more per­sonal than the pro­tected and pro­jected per­son­al­ity of the artist.

Thanks must also go out to Chelsea Labate of Ten Cent Poetry for gra­ciously allow­ing pho­tog­ra­phy at her events.

Chelsea Labate, per­form­ing as Ten Cent Poetry at the French Broad Brewery

I heard from a film pho­tog­ra­pher once that he would only shoot the first three songs of a con­cert. He said the energy level was high­est then and that at least one of the songs was going to be some­thing the crowd could get into. There was the prac­ti­cal real­ity that if you wanted to get your pho­tos in the papers then you had bet­ter get back to the hotel and start devel­op­ing ASAP. If I had fol­lowed his advice I would have missed this photo.

This was taken at the only live per­for­mance of a group of extremely, extremely tal­ented musi­cians that went by the name The Arche­techs. I believe all were taken dur­ing the song Mr. Multi-Million. The show was in a cramped room in down­town Asheville that was over­flow­ing with peo­ple. I’d been work­ing with the group to pro­vide imagery for their web­site, album mate­r­ial, etc and was excited to finally see them live. It was quite a mean­ing­ful experience.

There are some attrib­utes to a venue that help pho­tog­ra­phers. Great light­ing, easy to get around, awe­some stages — plenty of places have those fea­tures. The loca­tion of this show was not one of them. It was a com­pletely flat floor, pro­vid­ing for an inti­mate expe­ri­ence with the band but dif­fi­cult to get angles one nor­mally can get at an event. The light­ing was atro­cious. Barely any spe­cial light­ing for the band, and what there was were basi­cally direc­tional 40watt bulbs. So, out comes the 50mm f/1.4 and we’re shoot­ing pretty much wide open and hop­ing for decent fram­ing. ISO at least 1600 on a 5D all night. Look­ing for any set­tings that will come out sharp and rea­son­ably exposed.

Even with the dif­fi­cul­ties there were a great num­ber of pho­tos that came out at least decent. Some good energy shots, some nice inti­mate cap­tures, and espe­cially a series of Austin singing this one song. I remem­ber very clearly tak­ing the pho­tos and hav­ing high expec­ta­tions for a sin­gle defin­i­tive shot. But the more I looked at that series — try­ing to pick out “the one” — the more I leaned towards a set. It was clearer to me that a trip­tych con­veyed Austin’s emo­tions and con­vic­tions far more com­pletely than one soli­tary capture.

After mix­ing and match­ing the sets, I decided on these three. I enjoy the story they tell, the self­less­ness of the artist mixed with the con­vic­tion of the cause in the lyrics. Even though the pho­tos are grainy, the con­trast is higher than I pre­fer and the fram­ing isn’t per­fect, I can hear the song every time I see the pho­tos. Try­ing to accu­rately doc­u­ment the power of per­for­mance leads down many paths and most often the results aren’t what were expected.

To close, I don’t know if Austin has sung the song in pub­lic since this show, but I’d like to think that every time there is this much energy and soul in the performance.

My favorites from a con­cert at Jack of the Wood. It is a chal­leng­ing place to shoot — dark, no great angles, low stage — but it can also afford a lit­tle inti­macy with an unob­tru­sive cam­era. It was a great oppor­tu­nity to test the new Fuji X100 — very good low-light capa­bil­i­ties and can be basi­cally made as invis­i­ble as a film rangefinder. It was a great expe­ri­ence both with the shoot­ing and the results!

When the light­ing is rough, go to black and white. Not a hard and fast rule, or a good idea all of the time…or even some of the time. But with this show, I think it worked.

Fan­tas­tic pho­tog­ra­phy from The Turquoise Ball, by the Asheville Area Arts Coun­cil. At The Orange Peel in late August 2011.

A really fan­tas­tic show at the Orange Peel, and I was pretty pleased with the results from the event. 7D with the 50mm f/1.4, nearly all shot at 1/80 sec­ond at f/2.2 or so.