This first shot was taken of Preston Furman with my 580 EX II rigged up to a Home Depot clamp that was hanging upside down from the ceiling. The power was set at 1/8 and I had the ISO at 400 so I could get some good recycle times and not kill the batteries too fast. I went bare flash instead if using my stofen omni bounce just to see how it looked. The flash was out of the way of all the people there to see the show and nobody really seemed to be bothered by it (or at least never said or did anything about it). I wasn't too sure if it would be wide enough to get all the guys lit up since it was pretty close tot he stage already and the guitar player on the right was pretty far. I thought it worked out fine. The only thing I did when I was only shooting him was adjust my aperture to let a little more light in. I stopped down when shooting the guys individually that were closer. I stayed at 5.6 when I was shooting the whole band. I kind of liked being able to capture people rocking out without any blur. Kind of neat since my shutter speed was sometimes half a second. That let a bunch of ambient and got me cool light trails from the x-mas lights that were strung up. My biggest complaint are the shadows that were cast by the speakers hanging from the ceiling and the shadow the bass player cast on the drummer. Maybe using a second flash could fill in some of those shadows. I will just play around with one flash for now and then figure out how I can incorporate a second light later.
The next picture was taken with the same setup but no flash was used. The lighting at this bar was real bad so I had to crank up the ISO to get as much as I could out of the camera. The ISO was at 1600 and I'm not sure of what the shutter speed was. I had the aperture opened up as big as it would go. These shots are drastically different but not bad either. First off, no shadows. The natural lights look great. Even shooting at ISO 1600 the noise wasn't that bad. I ended up setting the white balance on my shirt since it was gray. I might need to start wearing that same shirt to other shows when the lights don't change. My new little secret/tip for anyone who stumbles upon this blog. The bad part but good part of these natural light shots is the blur. I think it ultimately it works in the end but I could see some people being turned off by the way these look. Nobody comes out perfectly sharp, but I think that once you go blurry you might as well let it go all the way like these did.
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