B&W Conversion
Guitar god Joe Satriani played the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta and the venue allowed “non-pro” cameras to be used, so I brought the Canon G9
With the help of a female friend (which helps to prevent being punched), was able to work our way up front behind a layer of a couple people. Took shots the whole show – about 400, until the battery almost ran out.
I had the G9 set to manual mode, no flash, using ISO 400, he lowest aperture available and played with shutter speeds from 1/80 – 1/160. A tip I came across is to use manual mode as the lights are always changing. Find some settings that work and keep them there.
I got some fairly decent exposures considering. The best came when the lights were up full of course. Noise at ISO 400 on the G9 in that light is pretty pervasive, but it lends an interesting quality to the shots. I had trouble with the auto-focus so I needed to look into setting a manual focus point, but got some good results and mistakes nonetheless.
I post-processed the shots using Lightroom 2.1 only, converting some to B&W and using Matt Kloskowski’s Sin City presets as a starting place on the shots when Satch was playing his red guitar. Played with the color temperature to achieve some good results. Shots with a lot of noise or lower light I went with B&W or muted colors to control the noise.
A slideshow of all the shots is up on my Flickr page here.
B&W - Some mis-focus leads to a neat effect
Satch hitting his trademark artificial harmonics - tilting this shot adds some interest
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