Friday night, November 26, 2010, the day after Thanksgiving.
Dim lights on a low, cracked, white ceiling. A punk band from San Diego that just pulled up to the dingiest bar in Tempe, the Palo Verde Lounge: a legendary place that opens at 6am with $2 Pabst Blue Ribbons, well whiskey and other fine ailments. A lineup featuring The Poos, The Teets and headliners Ass To Mustache.
Best break out the wide angle.
I called on a 17-35mm / f2.8 rental from Tempe Camera along with my Speedlite 580 exii flash – and they delivered.
The low white ceilings of the bar served as perfect reflectors to bounce the flash off of and down onto the musicians. At many concerts, the most difficult challenge is with dark backgrounds that are easily blacked out and subjects that are burnt and bleached with a too-direct flash (click here for an example). This wasn’t the case here, and the entire scene was illuminated when the flash was fired. The effect was magically dingy and very punk rock.
The wide angle was able to capture all of the action of a hyper, intoxicated band, without sacrificing proximity to the subjects or details.
One photo I failed to capture was a shot of the entire band in performance, from straight on. Lesson learned for the next show.
When editing the photos, I fiddled with filters, the channel mixer, shadow highlights and saturation and ended up with the images you see in this post. I took many of the pointers from this Photoshop tutorial on creating a grunge look in images.
To see more of my photos from the show, click here.