Jamfest 2008 Ashland KY

Every year a bunch of us recording musicians from Canada and the US get together for a weekend to play live on stage, camp out and generally party our brains out for a few days in the woods.

This year, I was the official photographer for the event and really gave my new EF 85 L a real workout and it worked quite well without a flash for the night shots and did even better in the daylight...well anyway, you be the judge! This was my first event so comments and critiques are appreciated as I'd love to get some opinions on my results.

Cheers!

I'm going to assume that your stunned silence is a firm indication of my flawless photographic skills and thank you for checking out my work!

Cheers!

Stick around... It usually takes a few days for most to come around after a busy weekend of shooting, and several days of post processing afterward. Than again, there are a lot of new posters here, and many are pretty shy about giving their opinions.

Interesting set you have here... A bit of daytime and evening lighting too... Seems like you have a knack for reading ambient light... The lighting and color composition, makes this set more interesting than most.

johnstoy wrote in post #5979573
Stick around... It usually takes a few days for most to come around after a busy weekend of shooting, and several days of post processing afterward. Than again, there are a lot of new posters here, and many are pretty shy about giving their opinions.

Interesting set you have here... A bit of daytime and evening lighting too... Seems like you have a knack for reading ambient light... The lighting and color composition, makes this set more interesting than most.

Thanks for stepping up and for your kind words!

The available light there at night was real minimal as we were running the entire event off of one 3500 watt gas powered generator, but I tried to make the most of it by shooting wide open at f/1.2 and running my 5D at ISO 3200 which seemed to do the trick and allowed me to keep my flash packed away in my bag.

Here's a few more from the evening performances...

Cheers!

Yep. Lighting looks pretty bad...

If you shot Raw, you might be able to get the red lights under control a bit better.
Red channel is quite blown now in a few images.

I'm not sure that not using the flash was the best idea... In some cases a *bit* of fill helps a lot. Flash isn't just about quantity of light, but also about quality of light...

René Damkot wrote in post #5980842
Yep. Lighting looks pretty bad...

If you shot Raw, you might be able to get the red lights under control a bit better.
Red channel is quite blown now in a few images.

I'm not sure that not using the flash was the best idea... In some cases a *bit* of fill helps a lot. Flash isn't just about quantity of light, but also about quality of light...

Thanks for your thoughts on the red channel being blown. I'm sure it was as Canon seems to have red issues in general and with over 200 shots taken during this event, I wasn't about to start spending the time to correct all of them as this wasn't a paying gig but rather just some friends getting together once a year to have some fun and much of my post processing work was performed the day after the event ended and being on the road for close to 12 hours to drive back home...I was tired!

I did go back and re-process one of my personal favorites from the set in Photoshop Elements 6, ( I don't own a copy of CS3), and played around with the levels to see if this issue could be addressed and indeed, there was some room for correction.

Posted below is the result of that extra effort;

Cheers!


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