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Cigarettes, beers and rock&roll

A couple of months ago me the miss’ and I, oh and the kids, spend an evening having dinner with friends at their house..

My friend is an avid musician in his spare time and spends every Thursday evening with his friends playing good old fashioned rock & roll…


He showed me some photos taken of them at a gig the played some time ago… they looked like the standard pictures you get from a point&shot camera, flash right in the kiss’er and slightly overexposed.

I told him that I had never taken pictures at a concert, but that I would love to give it a try one day. If I had wanted an invitation to see him play, telling him that I was interested in taking band photos, sealed the deal.

We agreed to meet up a couple of weeks later at one of those Thursday nights rehearsals. I packed my bag before leaving deciding to bring every piece of equipment I had. I new from a previous visit that even though the place wasn’t in a basement, it was as dark as one.

There were no windows at all, so even the slightest light from a street lamp wasn’t gonna be able to help me. Only thing lighting up the place was colored bare tungsten bulbs “disco-style”, a bare fluorescent lamp and a dragon head with red light bulb eyes, (not counting the light from the fridge everytime someone went over to get a beer, which happened occasionally ;-) ..)

I tried several different setups and the guys were great and let me do almost anything I wanted… I ended up using a flash through an umbrella most of the time, with a blue gel on the light to cool down the red and yellow disco lights in the ceiling.

(Tip for shooting rock music in a small garage: wear earplugs, ’cause the noise is up there rivaling levels I experience at work ;-) …)

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EXIF: ISO 200 - f/1.8 - 1/50

This was my first time shooting concert photos, but definitely not the last time… Oh, and if you get the chance go see these guys perform, not to shabby ;-)

You can check out the rest of the series here:

http://azr-photography.com/?page_id=1177

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