Ohh man have I really enjoyed listening to these two bands come out with their first albums. Fats LaBell is a soul psych rock band created by Tony Montanez of Fresno, CA and Sun Umbra is a psych rock band based out of Fresno, CA. Most of the members are in both bands, but they are two completely different sounds. Aaaaand my husband plays the bass in Fats LaBell!
They both played at this amazing bar in Fresno, CA called The Howlin Wolf. It has a 1920s/30s vibe and in my humble opinion, is the coolest looking bar in Fresno. It was awesome to get photos of them playing with that stunning background in the back.
Here are some thoughts I had on this photo session. Every time I take photographs, I want to learn something and take it with me to the next gig. On this occasion, I decided to shoot totally in automatic mode. This was completely outside my usual. I’m a manual mode only woman for the most part, so putting the setting on AUTO really chapped my hide a bit. :-p BUT I was trying to make sure I got a picture with the lighting situation. So I went auto.
And the ISO went up, up, up. For non photo people, ISO is the sensitivity of the camera to light. The higher the ISO, the more amount of grain you see in a photo. Optimally you want a low ISO to get a really clear picture. In low light situations, this is difficult! I’m still trying to figure out how to catch a clear photo of musicians without using a flash (I don’t want to be blinding them while they are playing) in a low light situation like a bar, with strobe color lighting. It’s complicated.
So although I did get some good shots, I think my idea of using auto was probably the wrong decision that night. My camera didn’t care if the photo was grainy or not, so it jacked up the ISO so high that I had a helluva time in post processing trying to edit that grain out. Oops! I would much have rather had the choice to top the ISO at a certain number and then change other settings appropriately. You can do a lot of creative stuff with movement and blur that in my opinion, looks cooler than a crazy grainy photo. On the flip side…there is a place for grain and some of the shots I think benefit from the grain.
Anyway! Those are my thoughts on this session! If you made it this far, kudos! I hope what I said made sense for photographers and non-photographers alike.
PS: WordPress (the website I use for this blog) is a dingbat and isn’t showing the full scale photo I would like it to since I’m embedding from another site. So if you want to see a larger scale photo, just click on any single one and it will show you the larger size.
Now on to the photographs…
Sun Umbra
a blog by Broken Eye 
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