Setup Fail

Kronika - 24.12.2022 live in Underground.

I didn't do flash photos on the stage for some time, so i decided to throw one in yesterday. To understand the conditions, the stage is a black box (sides and ceiling are black, and background is white cloth) and black reflects/bounces no light.

Often i would set the flash behind the white cloth, not ideal as it is a back lit shooting but the wall behind is white and this background is just one big softbox.

I was a bit lazy and wanted to try something different so i just gave the flash to the drummer and said to place it behind him.

Not the best decision i made :D As the flash was low and pointing up most of the light was eaten by the black ceiling. Not being able to change the flash power or position. Black eating the flash meant i needed more ISO and more ISO meant more ambient light in the photos. That got to more these weird colors.

---

Being ok with some burned out places, there were some decent photos.

On the keyboard side it was not that bad, but it was still pretty harsh light.

The crowd had a pretty good light from that flash :)

So i tried to turn the flash off and go with the ambient.

And to play a bit with shutter speed.

After one of the songs i waved to the drummer and asked him to move the flash a bit to the right. That gave the bass player a pretty decent light. And then the batteries in the flash died :D

So i went back to high ISO and ambient light. New addition to the ambient light that i didn't expect were 2 rotating lights on the ground pointing up. That meant Led lights from the top were set a bit lower power and those rotating lights were creating a pretty hard to catch pattern of lighting.

I did what could be done :) set the shutter to the high burst shots and started taking 5-6 burst photos to try and catch the rotation.

---

To illustrate the changing lights these two photos were taken in 1 second.

---

And with that example you can see why most of the photos are in black and white :)

After the "official" part was over and everything looked like time to go home for maybe an hour. Daniel (the bass player) randomly started playing drums and it escalated. After few songs was joined by some other musicians that were there, bartender decided he will sing. And another 3 hours jam by 8-9 people rotating on the stage. Got home at 6AM 🤷‍♂

---

New to photography? Struggling to understand Manual mode? Check out some tutorials for easy understanding of Manual Mode shooting.

Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode (tutorial, Part 1)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode, Shutter speed (tutorial, Part 2)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode, Aperture and ISO (tutorial, Part 3)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode - Thinking process (Tutorial Part 4)