Although predominantly a rehearsal studio, there is an amazing space upstairs complete with a Chinatown/Wild West bar that makes for a nice backdrop.

It was a conscious effect to not make the leader singer, Dave Larkin too prominent in every photo so I took a mixture of shots with each member in different positions to keep things as equal as possible.

A mixture of  ‘looking at/not looking at the camera’ posing was used, since it’s often hard to tell until later which method works best for the group.

The band were keen to check out what different clothing/hat combos worked best, this photo was taken as an off-the-cuff shot to show Dave his hat in the camera LCD screen. It ended up coming out as a nice natural portrait shot, something I’m always keen to capture.

Most of these shots were taken using the Canon 50mm 1.4 lens as I was able to get far back enough to include everyone in shot and the shallow depth of field helps the photos ‘pop’ out a bit more. Post production was done with Lightroom, using a number of the presets like ‘bleached bypass’ and ‘aged photo’ as a starting point, as they seemed to suit the surrounds.

Two of the tricks with any low-light indoor photography is toning down the orange look (setting the white balance to tungsten helps) and using a tripod. Many of these exposures were somewhere between 1/8th second to 4 seconds long, allowing enough light to fill the sensor and enough time to get that blurriness motion effect of the people.

Sometimes no matter how much you tweak the colour temperature, a photo can still look a bit ordinary so turning it into a black and white shot is often a good saving grace.

It took a little bit of trial and error positioning the flash to provide an even amount of diffused light through the baking paper. A piece of glass was used to provide reflections and Lightroom’s auto mask feature was a huge time-saver cleaning up around the edges of the products.

Even Burt got in on the action…

Fortunately, with a recent Live Music Accord being brokered behind the scenes just prior to the rally it looks like common sense will prevail. More information can be found on the SLAM website.

This is the original shot after crushing the black levels a bit and setting the white balance at around 3900K. The exposure was f16, 1/8000, ISO 100.

This is a shot of the same scene straight out of the camera with no effects and an exposure somewhere toward the middle of the range  (f11, 1/1000, ISO 100).