Worst Venue Ever - Jungle Juice @ HOB - Disney

[Suicidenote]

I've shot in great venues and bad ones, but this had to be the worst. It reminds me of all the stories I've heard on this board about where people got their start in small clubs.

This was a band called Jungle Juice, who were doing Led Zeppelin/Black Sabbath covers for HOB - Downtown Disney. First off, I originally thought that they were primarily a cover band, but found out later that they only started learning the songs a couple of weeks prior to the gig. The only way they could get the gig was to do this. Considering that they were not bad, the music was good, but it is really hard to sound like Robert Plant.

Now about the venue. I've been to the HOB - Anaheim many times, but was told that this was going to be in the Voodoo Lounge. Some of you may already know what this is, but I did not until I got there. The Voodoo Lounge is the restraunt. At one of the restraunt they had a little "cave" where they setup bands to play, no stage - only on the floor. There are 2 giant columns about 4' x 4' that blocks most angles and with 3 people in front of the drummer, someone is always standing behind 1 of the columns. Now the lighting could have easily been fixed, but what they had was a light bar with 2 amber lights and a disco ball between the columns. This wouldn't have been so bad had they pointed the lights at the band and not at the crowd. Also railing down one side that you had to walk to back of venue and walk past the crowded bar if you wanted to get pictures from the left side. Also didn't help that the wife of one of the band members was videotaping the show and was blocking the front of the stage.

I guess I should have thought about using flash, but the thought never crossed my mind.

Enough with my excuses, here are the pictures.

1.
http://www.monstarphoto.com/Canon/JJ/1.jpg

2.
http://www.monstarphoto.com/Canon/JJ/2.jpg

3.
http://www.monstarphoto.com/Canon/JJ/3.jpg

4.
http://www.monstarphoto.com/Canon/JJ/4.jpg

5.
http://www.monstarphoto.com/Canon/JJ/5.jpg

6.
http://www.monstarphoto.com/Canon/JJ/6.jpg

[René Damkot]

Don't see any exif. Doesn't look too bad in the circumstances you describe.

[blackshadow]

Good results - but it looks fairly well lit compared to some of the venues I shoot in.

[DwightMcCann]

I'm glad I don't shoot in this style of venue ... I wouldn't get anything!

[Suicidenote]

Good results - but it looks fairly well lit compared to some of the venues I shoot in.

You should see how they looked coming out of the camera. PP really saved these pictures.

EXIF should be there. But were shot with 50mm 1.4 @ f/1.4 1600iso, not sure of the speeds.

[René Damkot]

Nope, no EXIF. Tried both in Safari and Firefox.
f/1.4 at ISO 1600 doesn't sound too bad ;)

[CanonXTuser]

Good results - but it looks fairly well lit compared to some of the venues I shoot in.

yup, same here. looks like daylight in comparison to lighting like below:

http://warangel.typepad.com/photos/hotspur_06jan/hotspur_jan28img_4514_01_w2201_adj_500.jpg

And this is after boosting up by the equivalent of at least 1-1.5 fstops in Photoshop. This is at f2.8 at iso1600.

[Suicidenote]

Maybe you just don't realize my skill of shooting in the dark.


Or maybe I'm just used to much better lighting situations than most of you.

[narlus]

show some EXIF...these look like the center of sun compared to where i shot last night :D

[Suicidenote]

show some EXIF...these look like the center of sun compared to where i shot last night :D

Not sure why it wouldn't show for you, don't know what I did differently. Does this work for you?

It was bumped up 1 stop in Lightroom.

[Suicidenote]

Oh and by the way I was joking about my skill. I'm just learning. Learn more every day that I'm here and every shoot that I do. Actually finding that I'm learning more about PP, but you could study Photoshop and other tools until the day you die and never learn it all.

[goatee]

The reason why everyone is saying how the lighting doesn't look that bad is because it's universally dull. Having to shoot at 1/50s f/1.4 ISO 1600 shows that it must have almost been black as night! That's one situation where the 50mm f/1.8 would have just laughed at you - (in fact any lens that doesn't have USM/HSM/etc) the USM on the f/1.4 really saved the day. I think you did a fantastic job considering the lighting!

[CanonXTuser]

Oh and by the way I was joking about my skill. I'm just learning. Learn more every day that I'm here and every shoot that I do. Actually finding that I'm learning more about PP, but you could study Photoshop and other tools until the day you die and never learn it all.

yeah, if that was serious, it sure did come across as incredibly arrogant and petty because we didn't jump on your bandwagon about the HOB - anaheim being the worse lighted place ever.

I mean, yeah, makes perfect sense, that the house of blues would have poorer lighting then the make shift garages, firehalls, former warehouses, and rural youth centers that some of us shoot at, after all, it's not like the house of blues would have any money.

it was a good cry for attention though!

[Suicidenote]

HOB-Anaheim has good lighting in their actual concert venue. Just the restraunt where they decided to stick a band in a corner of the floor to play for the bar had terrible lighting. Having a band play in the restraunt seems like an afterthought with no need for real lighting.

[René Damkot]

Having to shoot at 1/50s f/1.4 ISO 1600 shows that it must have almost been black as night!

:lol: Hahaha. Welcome to the real world ;)
Actually, I think the quality of light is rather okay. Could have used some backlighting, but apart from that, some nice light... Rather more soft then the usual stage lighting. IMO a pleasure to work with ;)
I take low lighting over bad lighting any day...

'Black as night' IMO means unable to focus. That would be around 3 stops slower...

On the EXIF:

Exif Info by read_exif_data() / php 4.4.4

FileSize: 69184
MimeType: image/jpeg
SectionsFound: APP12
COMPUTED:
html: width="288" height="432"
Height: 432
Width: 288
IsColor: 1
Company: Ducky
Info:


That's all there is. No shutterspeed, ISO, lens or aperture...

For comparison:
Part of the exif off CanonXTUsers image:


ExposureTime: 1/125
FNumber: 28/10
ExposureProgram: 4
ISOSpeedRatings: 1600
DateTimeOriginal: 2007:01:28 10:22:17
DateTimeDigitized: 2007:01:28 10:22:17
ShutterSpeedValue: 456510/65536
ApertureValue: 194698/65536
ExposureBiasValue: -2/2


Also not overly dark, but more difficult color and contrast wise.

Disclaimer: Oh, and obviously, I'm not trying to knock anyone in any way...

[blackshadow]

Here's an example shot at 3200ISO, f1.4 1/50 shutter speed with very little if any post processing... just to show there are far worse conditions - if I went back and post processed this better I'm sure it could be cleaned up a lot more.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c251/spindoctor66/Tourettes%2077/T19.jpg

[Atheomerase]

Last club I had to shoot at had the stage bathed in hideous red lights, it took 2/3 through the show to get other colors/lights up there so I could get some decent shots. Those shots look pretty good given bad conditions.

[CanonXTuser]

My worst venue was the basement of a church with no lights on, repeat no lights and the "stage" lit by christmas lights ... seriously ... white christmas lights running along the floor and the roof .............. and the autofocus stopped working on my 50mm 1.4, presuming it would have found focus in the first place in that light.

[kmb]

Concerning bad lighting, one of the worst gigs was a warmup act where there was no lighting engineer, just "what happened to be on". Here are two images (the only two successful) from that gig:
#1 - 35mm, f1.4, ISO1600, 1/25 s (http://kuvat.huumakuva.net/displayimage.php?pos=-1140)
#2 - 35mm, f1.4, ISO1600, 1/35 s (http://kuvat.huumakuva.net/displayimage.php?pos=-1136)

(Note that I never use ISO3200 (or the so called "H"-mode) - I underexpose in ISO1600 and push it in RAW converter, which is technically superior to choosing H-mode in camera).

[René Damkot]

I underexpose in ISO1600 and push it in RAW converter, which is technically superior to choosing H-mode in camera).

I forget that sometimes... Then again, what if you have to underexpose even at ISO 3200 to get the shot (http://www.moonglade.net/~rene/061007Overload/source/rhd_20061007overl0014.htm)? ;)

[kmb]

what if you have to underexpose even at ISO 3200 to get the shot (http://www.moonglade.net/%7Erene/061007Overload/source/rhd_20061007overl0014.htm)? ;)

In that case, you get to use a flash ;)

[narlus]

(Note that I never use ISO3200 (or the so called "H"-mode) - I underexpose in ISO1600 and push it in RAW converter, which is technically superior to choosing H-mode in camera).

hadn't heard that before. do you have any comparison photos?

i've used 3200 on occasion and while it's not my first choice, i've found that underexposing and still using 1600 wouldn't get adequate results, wrt shutter speeds.

[René Damkot]

hadn't heard that before. do you have any comparison photos?

Here (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=222969&highlight=ISO+1600) is a thread....

i've found that underexposing and still using 1600 wouldn't get adequate results, wrt shutter speeds

Mind explaining the difference betwee shooting ISO 1600 EC -1 and ISO 3200 EC 0 wrt shutterspeeds ? :lol:

[kmb]

hadn't heard that before. do you have any comparison photos?

The deal is this:
- Noise is the same in ISO3200 vs. ISO1600 pushed one stop (because, noise-wise it is the same thing - image is "amplified" digitally by one stop in both cases). There are some comparison shots for this, I'll try to find them (yet again ;)) at some point.
- The H-mode (ISO3200) is achieved by bit-shifting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_shift#Bit_shift) (left-shift). This means that "values are doubled", e.g. one stop more light. It also means that data is lost. This data-loss is also present in RAW images, because the bit shifting is done to the RAW data (the reason for this escapes me - why not just have some sort of metadata field there to tell the raw converter that IT should do the bit shifting, in which case the converter could let user to override this if necessary).

Somebody has verified this by reading DCraw RAW-converter's source code, I cannot find the net page where this was explained now.

Anyway, the conclusion is that images taken in H mode are more less likely to be recovered from over exposure by adjusting the exposure compensation slider in RAW converter. The data of the "brightest part" of the image data has been thrown away when pushing all the other parts to be brighter (sorry for the low-tech speech here, I hope you catch my drift).

In most cases, all this won't probably matter. It's often just technical perfectionism that in most cases is useless (I'm a computer scientist on university level, so technical perfectionism is something I've been taught, I find this stuff - be it useless or not - interesting :)).

[narlus]

Mind explaining the difference betwee shooting ISO 1600 EC -1 and ISO 3200 EC 0 wrt shutterspeeds ? :lol:


what i meant was that sometimes even @ 3200, i am still -1 stop or so using EC. not sure i want to do -2 EC @ 1600.

[Metalphotographer]

I'll be shooting a very underground, invite only "black metal" festival for two nights in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado this summer. The organizers want a photo booklet to go with a DVD they will be selling of the event and they picked me to do the shooting because I'm fairly well known in the US underground metal scene and have worked with a lot of the bands. The bands will not be playing until night falls and there will be no lighting other than torches and candles. I have a feeling that this event will be the worst performance lighting ever so I am planning on renting a couple of really fast primes for it. Even with that I'm wondering if I am going to end up using fill flash to get anything usable :)

[narlus]

if it's really dark, there's no such thing as 'fill flash' :D

i'd bring a flash, myself.

edit - just curious, can you tell me who's on the bill?

[bacchanal]

show some EXIF...these look like the center of sun compared to where i shot last night :D

I love it :cool:

Seriously though...last weekend I was shooting 1/40 f/1.4 ISO3200 at one show and still ended up pushing them in pp...(nasty). I won't bother to post them here but they're on my zenfolio if you want to see what suck truely looks like.

[Metalphotographer]

edit - just curious, can you tell me who's on the bill?

Confirmed acts right now are as follows, I can't give out much more info as it's sort of a "secret" event :)

Nightbringer – Nibiru - Teratism - Legions of Astaroth - Dagon - Ashdautus - Abyssmal Nocturne - Gräuen Pestanz

[narlus]

cool, but i know absolutely none of those bands! then again, i'm a true neophyte in the black metal oeuvre.

i did hear that Emperor were playing 3 US shows (NYC, Chicago, LA).

[narlus]

I love it :cool:

Seriously though...last weekend I was shooting 1/40 f/1.4 ISO3200 at one show and still ended up pushing them in pp...(nasty). I won't bother to post them here but they're on my zenfolio if you want to see what suck truely looks like.

i just checked 'em out (lee's apt, right?) and i thought they came out pretty damned good, to be honest. sure, they aren't the crispest shots ever, but i think (w/o knowing anything about the band) that you captured the event pretty nicely.

[René Damkot]

I love it :cool:

Seriously though...last weekend I was shooting 1/40 f/1.4 ISO3200 at one show and still ended up pushing them in pp...(nasty). I won't bother to post them here but they're on my zenfolio if you want to see what suck truely looks like.

i just checked 'em out (lee's apt, right?) and i thought they came out pretty damned good, to be honest. sure, they aren't the crispest shots ever, but i think (w/o knowing anything about the band) that you captured the event pretty nicely.

Both Lee's app and Standard Recordin co. look pretty dandy to me...
All could use a bit highr contrast (darker shadows) IMO, that would also eliminate some of the noise...

I say; post 'em up!

[DwightMcCann]

Reading this thread is like Greek to me: I always have great light and have no clue what "Metal" is, let alone "Black Metal" ... I almost expect human sacrifices after reading some of the band names. I much prefer Jazz and classical music but don't know many of those performers either.

[narlus]

Reading this thread is like Greek to me: I always have great light and have no clue what "Metal" is, let alone "Black Metal" ... I almost expect human sacrifices after reading some of the band names.

you aren't far off...the leader of Burzum is in jail for burning churches and killing an ex-band member.

he won't be winning any Person of the Year awards, but damned if _Filosofem_ isn't a fantastic record.