I enjoyed some lively hit music from Top Shelf at Broadway Brew in Troy, NY featuring my lovely cousin Rachel.
Check out Top Shelf on Facebook for your next wedding or corporate event.

I was taking pictures of a band in a bar last night, and I ran across a rather interesting phenomenon. The band had set up some newfangled LED stage lights on either side of the stage. These were vertical banks of red, green, and blue LEDs that would cycle through color patterns to create a dynamic effect on the band. Inexpensive LEDs are revolutionizing all sorts of lighting scenarios, and club lighting is just one of them. But something strange was happening. One of the musicians with a saxophone was standing right next to an LED light bank. I saw amazing swirls of red, green, and blue in the brass of his horn, so I moved in to capture that in a photograph. But, the photograph I took showed nothing but a nice even white light. Verrrry interesting, I thought. I wondered if there was some sort of flickering with the LEDs that was invisible to the naked eye but not the camera sensor. I came home and started digging on le interwebs, and while I didn’t find the exact answer, I did come across some interesting info. Basically, the opposite was happening.

Unlike incandescent bulbs with a colored gel, LEDs emit light along a very narrow frequency. A blue LED is really very pure blue. A red LED is very pure red. This is not a huge deal to our eyes because we can handle it pretty well, but digital camera sensors are a bit trickier. In researching LED effects on camera sensors, I came across a fascinating discussion that shed some light on other issues I’d encountered in concert photography. If you’ve anything of a technical mind, you can dig through this thread on candlepowerforums.com. (A guy named Vincent Tseng has done a lot of thinking about this. Props to him for his action in that thread) Now, I will try to sum it up briefly as best I can: It so happens that the vast majority of digital camera sensors are arranged in such a way that half the sensor is devoted to capturing green light. (See a Bayer filter explanation on Wikipedia) The other half is evenly divided to red light and blue light. (You’ll recall that various mixtures of R G & B light will give us pretty much any color we should wish to see.) In the real world, pretty much every color is a recipe of some mixture of red, green, and blue. Camera sensors pick up each color separately and then the processor remixes them back into the image we saw in the first place. It’s all very clever for most everything you want to take a picture of.

But, enter LED lights. The frequency of LEDs being so pure can actually be problematic for camera sensors. This is very clearly seen when these LED stage lights shine pure blue, pure red, or even pure blue+red (magenta) on a subject. Since this light has no green at all in those hues, half the digital camera sensor is rendered useless. The practical result is that a person illuminated in this pure non-green LED light will have a cartoonish flat face — or at least a lot of banding where the digital image will shift from one color abruptly to another with nothing inbetween — because the sensor isn’t picking up enough visual information in those areas. This is how I understand it anyway, I’m not an optical engineer, but I do know a little physics.

Back in my old life of frequenting concerts and clubs to shoot musical happenings I was always vaguely aware of certain club lighting that would result in crappy photographs. Now I know why. The former Spaceland was the worst, since the LED banks were often all that was being used.

Here’s a shot of the band Castledoor which I rejected because the light made the singers face look plastic. At the time, I just chalked it up to low light in general, but now I know that the LED lighting contributed to the flat cartoonish magenta.

So does this explain my phantom rainbows in a saxophone which I couldn’t capture? I’m guessing yes. I’m thinking my sensor was having trouble seeing the three “pure” red green and blue frequencies that my eye was enjoying and saw a whiter light than my eye did. I’ve still not got my head around it entirely, but there is something to it for sure.

I do find it humorous that the gear toted around by your basic concert photographer is getting more and more technically advanced — and more and more expensive. Meanwhile, the miraculous “cheap LED” that is making cool lighting effects available to more and more venues and bands is conspiring to make concert photos worse and worse.

There is a type of digital camera sensor known as the Foveon sensor that appears most notably in the Sigma DP2. As I understand it, this sensor should be less susceptible to that sort of thing, but I haven’t seen any real examples. I can imagine a market-opportunity for someone to come up with a phased filter of some sort for LED-illuminated photography.

And, of course, this should not be a problem at all for your trusty film camera. But, have fun shooting enough frames of film to get the perfect concert moment, Richie Rich. I am very curious and may one day borrow an LED stage light and run some side-by-side shots with digital and film.

So, what to do in the meantime? Well, shoot RAW as much as possible to capture as much information as your camera can. RAW won’t make the problem go away, but shooting only JPEG makes it even worse. Keep an eye on how the stage lighting changes and really go for those times when the light mix is NOT pure red or blue or magenta. Also, black and white conversions can occasionally save a washed out magenta shot. I hope this helps! If you have other ideas, please leave a comment.

Ok, I’m stupid. I was browsing Wikipedia for celeb birthdays and saw this:

Gee, I have a pic of The Cure’s bassist, I thought. So I dug into the archives and found the previously unpublished pic above. I re-processed and uploaded, and then I launched a full social blast on all channels to display my cleverness. Just one problem. Phil Thornalley isn’t the real Cure bassist. He was a one-time fill-in/producer. Debi Del Grande correctly laughed at me and pointed out my gaffe. Thanks, Debi! Boy, I feel stupid. The picture I have is of Simon Gallup, the real Cure bassist. So, Happy Birthday Phil… and there is a pic of Simon whose birthday it is not. Cool? Cool. Then go see all of Debi’s pics of The Cure. #1 Superfan!

Here’s the one we used for Yahoo! Music:

In my quest to develop a craft, I went to the Bootleg Theater in Silver Lake on Friday to photograph the band LoveLikeFire. It was yet another venue I’d never been to and didn’t know what to expect for lights. What I saw when I got there were just some dim overhead bulbs. So indie rock!

This time I brought the 50mm f/1.4 and the 70-200 f/2.8L with some image-stabilizing action. I knew no matter what happened with the “fitty”, I’d get something with the “moneymaker.”

Also on the bill was a local band called All Wrong and the Plans Change, featuring a real stunner on lead vox. The color on those shots was so bad, but they converted to monochrome fairly nicely. Cheat! (See below)

When LoveLikeFire came on, I really tried to pay attention to technical detail and get some sharp shots, which I did. The above shot was with the 50mm at f/1.8 and 1/160 sec. Whats interesting is that most of my sharp shots came after I switched back linking auto-focus to the shutter instead of the back button. (You can read about the benefits of back-button focus here.) The literature even suggests back-button focus is better for moving subjects. So, my success in switching to shutter seems counter intuitive to me, but perhaps using the shutter button brings the moment of shutter-release closer chronologically to the moment of focus, by a few milliseconds at least. I much prefer back-button focus, but it might actually be too slow for subjects moving front-to-back? I will keep experimenting.

I was getting sharp shots, but nothing very dramatic. The dull overhead bulbs added nothing. A week after complaining about the static red and blue lights at Spaceland, I would have killed for something so interesting.

Then with two songs left in LoveLikeFire’s set, I broke out a speedlight, put it on a bracket and slapped a Lumiquest Softbox III on it. I know it looked ridiculous, but I wanted to see what sort of results it brought. I had some trouble getting the flash to fire. Maybe the TTL cord I used (off-brand) is dodgy? When it did fire, the light was enough to illuminate the subject, but again pretty boring for a rock concert.

This shot is with the softboxed speedlight. The bracket pushed the strobe away from the axis enough that there is nice definition on her chin. But there’s not a lot of drama.

I’ll continue to practice. Having an accomplice to stand off to the side with a gelled flash to light the background would be rad, but likely impractical. Asking the band if I could place a light in back might work. Would I ever get the balls to do that?

Oh yeah, and here the gorgeous singer from All Wrong:

I remember tales of Serious Photographers who wouldn’t be caught dead shooting a wedding. I guess it can be considered base or mercenary. I’ve heard stories of photogs doing weddings on the weekends for money but keeping it Very Secret from their contemporaries.

Then there are some photographers I admire who do weddings for fun or profit. They are not so pretentious and see the world as filled with opportunity for great photos. That seems reasonable to me

I recently discovered that concert photography also suffers from a similar lack of respect. Some of my friends and neighbors consider the photography of pop musicians unartful, silly, boring, or even (gasp) too easy. I’ve been told directly by Serious Photographers that concert photography lacks merit and impact!

I don’t care. I love it.

I’ve recently joined the pool of photographers shooting concerts for the Los Angeles life and culture blog LAist.com. You may recall one of my photos being picked as Photo of the Day over there a while back. My first assignment for them was last month to take pictures of a couple great bands: The Dears and Great Northern. The feature was published on LAist.com over this past weekend, and I’m thrilled. The writer of this piece, Jeremy, is very talented and a nice person as well.

I see concert photography as a unique and unparalleled look at human expression, I see sides of humans that can be captured no other way. I think like any photography, it can be easy to do, but hard to do well. I believe it’s valid, worthwhile, and above all exciting. I’m looking forward to doing more concert work for LAist.com in the months ahead.

Great Northern, The Dears @ Echoplex 5/23/09 – LAist.

Right this very moment, our heroes of summer are honing their reflexes to catlike precision. They’re sharpening their eyes to slow down action and not miss a single important detail. The titans of baseball know that preparation now will mean the difference between glory and second place. Spring training is where it all starts.

Um, me too!

With the Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival looming, and my photographer’s pass pending* I wanted to get some swings in with my trusty old Canon 5D with the kung-fu battery grip. Given my recent preoccupation with film, I haven’t gone on extended shoot with the digital “five-dizzle” in months, and I haven’t used the grip since last year’s Coachella. Compared to the rangefinders I’ve been shooting, going out with the gripped SLR feels like I’m taking photos with a barbecue grill. It reminds me a little bit of this, too. Yes, I needed some practice.

The North Hollywood sector of Los Angeles county is undergoing a remarkably fast rebirth as a hipster art district. That is, it wants to be. It’s a melting pot of serious community theaters, art galleries, countless new lofts and apartments, and general development — all centered around the fact that it’s the last stop on the L.A. Metro Red Line. The NoHo Arts District council is nothing if not enthusiastic about all of this and has launched Hear NoHo — a first Thursdays series of local music showcases dotted around the different businesses in the NoHo area. The first one was last night.

I tried to hit a bunch of the performances, ended up getting to see six local acts in some pretty unique locations. There’s a local theater, and then there’s the NoHo Arts Center. They’re currently running a production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In a stroke of brilliance, or maybe expedience, they put the rock band Carney right into Dracula’s living room — keeping the set intact. I saw a quirkyperky duo entertain the youth in a hip demo loft, an acoustic balladeer serenade the Pitfire Pizza patio crowd, funk and soul among high art, and an engaging songstress in a blacker-than-black empty theater set. And, it was all for free! The music was good and local and I got the chance to knock out some pretty standard concert shots. I got my spring workout in.

I’m really rooting for Hear NoHo to keep it going. It would be nice for it to grow and be the place to be on the first Thursday of every month. This debut was free to all comers, though the map and schedule I picked up on the way said it was only five dollars per venue. I guess that’s where they hope to be at some point. I’m skeptical how much local music people will shell out cash for. Maybe the neighborhood is passionate about all things local and will support it, but I’m also rooting for free.

Links:

Hear NoHo’s homepage
My Flickr photoset

* knock on wood-like surface

Play this while you read: “New Shoes” – Paolo Nutini

Stars sing with their eyes open.

That’s what I’ve noticed as I’ve photographed a few singers here and there. The ones that are really big, or want to be really big keep their eyes open and engage with the audience, while soaking in everything around them. Then there is the other side, to singing in public. The ones who go inside, sing to themselves and and secretly want it to just be over.

Yes, some of the greatest singers is history have closed their eyes on occasion. I’m talking about their default state, singin’ a verse. I’m not even talking about talent. A lot of very talented people aren’t stars. To be a star you need talent, plus something more indescribable that’s completely separate from talent. There’s something about those that have “it,” and those that don’t. And, not surprisingly, it’s usually in the eyes.

I found myself pondering this as I took photos of talented and fun Scottish balladeer, Paolo Nutini, as he played a free show to a hundred people or so. The crowd was too shy to even walk up to the edge of the stage, and he was too shy to open his eyes. And, I really liked his music. I thought it was cool. Anytime, you bring the horn section to a free show scores you points with me. He’s got a lot of talent and charisma. He just doesn’t open his eyes.

I needed another stamp on my OGMC* membership card, so I tagged along with Alex G. and Steve D. to the Nokia last night to catch none other than Steely Dan. To make a long solo short, they took their sweet time getting to the “hits,” and boy do they have a few weak and brittle skeletons in the old closet mixed in with the treasures. Parts of the show were hard to get through, but eventually they got to “Hey Nineteen,” eventually they got to “Josie,” eventually they got to “Peg,” eventually they even got to “Kid Charlemagne” — sadly, no surprise Kanye appearance, though. Finished up strong. Pretty strong, with a big “except” however: After the first and only encore wrapped with the classic “FM“, it quickly became apparent that Fagen and Becker were not going to do “Deacon Blues.” (“Blue” it off?) They were not going to do “Do It Again.” (As in, not going to?) They were not going to do “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” (I guess she lost it, after all?) They were not even going to do “Reelin’ In The Years.” (The one that got away?)

We were stunned. Everyone around us was stunned.

I don’t think this is forgivable honestly.

I wonder how much of this is just lingering bitterness from their bloody feud with the Eagles from back in the day. Here’s the real story of how The Eagles came to do guest vocals on “FM.”

* Old Guy Music Club