At this moment, I can produce an advance workflow for going into this assignment and then I will complete any amendments and comments at the time of shooting and record them.
WORKFLOW
For starters, I will not be able to take my DSLR camera into the gig venue so therefore I will be using my compact camera. This will eliminate the need to charge my camera battery and sort any lenses but in preparation I will still need to check that I have enough space on my memory card and that I have replacement AA batteries just in case.
I will also not require my tripod due to the nature of the event. I will be photographing from the crowd and therefore unable to use a tripod but I am aware that the low lighting will be an issue and my compact camera does not have the ability to amend an ISO setting, so this will be a challenge to face at arrival at the venue.
I will be hoping to get a good spot at the front of the crowd to be able to get some good performance shots of the band. If at all possible, I'd like to be able to move about to at least three different positions/camera angles of the stage but depending on the volume of other attendees, I predict this will be highly unlikely. So I hope to arrive early enough to get a decent enough spot to be able to at least overview the whole stage area.
I will still have to adjust my camera settings, even though i'm only using my compact camera. I can still adjust the aperture/shutter speed or depending on the shooting conditions, I can shoot manual. I wont be able to use my flash so I will have to just be prepared to decide the best option when I get there.
This is obviously a timed shoot as I will be trying to get the best possible shots of the entire gig in the time the gig is on, so I really need to be able to capture the essence of the band and the atmosphere within that time scale through poses, expression and crowd participation. I am there to enjoy the music as well so I don't intend on taking pictures all night. I plan on making use of the 3 song rule for myself to see if I can capture what I need in that time scale but I can adjust accordingly. During shooting I would also need to check my histogram and use on the spot development to negotiate a change in any settings etc due to possible lighting changes.
Following the gig, I will be uploading all images from my memory card to photoshop elements to evaluate the images in a separate selection process.
Here, I will be using the five step process of refinement to narrow down my images, taking out noticeably unusable images immediately and then producing the best 6-12 images as my final choices. Along the way I will be labeling my selection choices for each step.
I will then save all my images and selection processes to my external hard drive and exhibit my final choices in an online web gallery for assessment.
I now have a couple of weeks until the gig so I will continue with the course during this time and will come back to this assignment then.
GIG SHOOT
In practice the shoot pretty much followed to the advance workflow.
On arriving at the venue, the lighting was a lot worse than I had originally expected and so even after altering my shutter speed/ aperture, the lighting was just too dim and therefore the best option was to use both the auto setting and the auto scene recognition settings. I was also able to use my flash after all so that was a another amendment to the original workflow.
I originally stated that I wanted to possibly move about to a number of positions but in practice, this was not possible. The venue was very small and without an actual 'stage' , so the gig was very intimate but also very crowded and there was no possibility of moving to shoot at different angles.
The gig lasted for about an hour for the main band so this was my shooting time. I took a wide variety of photographs during this time including different band members, poses and member positioning. I also used on the spot development to check images taken to keep tabs on my progress.
Following the gig, all photos were uploaded to photoshop elements to start the selection process and to evaluate the most appropriate images for editing. I have listed each process of selection below:
All images
I had a large selection of images to work with, therefore I uploaded them all to photoshop elements and then sorted through them, taking out all the immediate unworkable ones (see below).
Technical edit
Selects
With my group of selects I had a lot that looked the same and a lot of one band member so I then made my selection of 'first selects'.
First Selects
Again, I still had a lot of the same poses, etc but I managed to go back through and review these selects again to choose my final favourite photographs of the night.
Group and Review
I decided at this stage to start editing all of the above images, as I wanted to include all of these in my personal portfolio, and then I would go about choosing my final edits afterwards. With the music being heavy rock, I wanted to edit the images so that the final result would reflect the genre of the music. I edited each photo in PICNIK as it has some great effects including sepia, grayscale, vignette, cross process and a number of others that I chose to use. The final images all have a selection of these effects to enhance the theme I was wanting to create. After looking through these edited images I decided on my final images.
Final Images
I have displayed these final edited images in a web gallery. This can be found here:
Workflow web gallery
I am extremely happy with my final choices and the final edits of these images. I have a real passion for photographing music events, due to the fact that I am joining two of my greatest passions. I think that the essence of the gig has really been captured through these images and that is what I was trying to do.
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