Whenever you go on an assignment to shoot a gig you never know what you're going to get in terms of lighting. More often than not you need to struggle with a large aperture and exposure time just barely freezing the artists' motion and pray the images will be in focus enough to compensate for that slight motion blur here and there and the aberrations from using the lens wide open. Not this time, in this case the lights went off completely just as the performance was about to begin.

Instead of the more traditional continuous lighting, the entire concert was illuminated by 3 strobes shooting bursts of sharp light from 3 different locations around the stage. This is actually pretty awesome, like a bunch of flashguns at your disposal. With a difference - the flashes of light were not in sync with the shutter release. But there's an easy way around this, setting the exposure time to a much longer value, something around 1/8th to 1/4th of a second. No need to worry about motion blur, the strobes will still freeze it. The long exposure time is actually only there to raise your chances that a burst of light will happen while you have the shutter open. Using such a long time may also result in a multiple exposure effect that happens when a strobe fires twice while the exposure is taking place. Which results in some pretty funky images.

Last but not least, Vision Fortune rock. Period. I would gladly pay to see a gig where they're the headliner (last night they were supporting Halls).

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