Sometimes it’s got to be death. Just like last year, Death Feast was a hell of a show. Death Metal shredding and grunting 24/7, is there any better ambiance for a two day photographic marathon?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the festival before Friday in the late afternoon because of my studies, but I was in time in the pit to see the EVOCATION show. The Death Feast is an absolutely funny festival. Lots of drunken weirdos doing silly things, but everything in a peaceful manner and very funny to watch. And for sure we had never ending suppy of beer and (tada) good weather.

From the view of a photographer, not everything was as nice as it could be. There was no song limit and a moderately proportioned stage, which was good of course. On the other side, I found the lighting situation somewhat disappointing. As on every festival, the daylight shots aren’t this satisfying, the sun and its unpleasent shadowcast ist just too dominant. Annoyingly the Death Feast had abundant backlight and smoke but seriously no frontlighting. This meant that especially the bands in the late afternoon and sunset were lit best, because of the soft rest of sunlight and the already perfectly visible backlight whereas the headliner bands needed flash to be exposed properly most of the time.

Best performances were demonstrated by GENERAL SURGERY, MISERY INDEX, HAEMORRAGE and ASPHY, but NAPALM DEATH wasn’t that bad either, as the always are.

Apart from that there is not much to be reported. D300 was main camera als always, D70s stayed back in the car like my laptop did, which wasn’t very useful this time since my 2 8GB Extreme IV CF-Cards were enough for the two days. 17-50 and 70-200 were both used quite equally, the rest of the equipment stayed in the bag together with one or two cans of beer, besides the SB600 which found some use als already reported. There’s only one thing that bugs my right now, my D650AW bag is getting quite heavy on my shoulders these days. I might decide to take a look at some belt systems to distribute the weight of the equipment more equally while retaining the quick acces time.

As always I completed the workflow of my pictures completely in Lightroom 2.4, it’s really the easiest way for me to select and process the 1367 shots I made this time. Any more questions?

Sometimes you just have to get your ass out of the door to rediscover your hobby once again, as I did last weekend. Okay, this may sound more profound than it really is, but seriously: I think its very pleasing and important to start from scratch once in a while, to find out why you really love concert photography and where you still can improve and develop.

I had one of these moments when I attended U&D festival last saturday. It was a spontaneous decision to go there with some friends of mine, I quickly decided to grab my camera and off we went. No pit, no limits, no deadlines or other commitments, totally unknown surroundings and bands. These are, in my opinion, the perfect conditions zo experiment, to change your photography habits and work on your weak sides rather than heavily relying on your strenghts.

Actually the lighting was surprisingly good in parts, although I had to dial up the ISO setting to 3200 in the end, which brings the D300 to its limits. All the pogoing punks and rockers posed sporty challenge too. Unfortunately, this limited the possibilities to shoot from. You could either go very tight to the front of the stage, meaning you would have to go wide and photograph from a rather steep angle from below, or orientate yourself more to the back of the crowd and take the tele zoom to make your pictures with a flat angle.

In the end, the pictures aren’t the most important part of this concert for me. I’m more thankful for the joy and experience such “one man workshops” help me to achieve. More landscape format shooting, more active thinking about the backgrounds, the lighting and the composition rather than just shooting by instinct, more control over autofocus. If you don’t already do things like this, then what are you waiting for? Grab your camera and kick yoursel out of the door, just shoot something small or unknown to you. This is the only real way we photogs can evolve our skills and get better in what we love to do.

PS: I’d really like to hear some opinions on this topic. What do you do to improve yourself? You can also write me some general critics on my blog, I’m really interested to see who is reading all of this.

Edit: Everything worked fine. Now that I got a clean new version up, I might think about some new plugins and stuff for better usability for me and you.

This will be a fast one, just click on “Read More” for the full information

Okay, I’m really going to make a quick one out of this. Still got lots of things to do so my time is as always very limited.

Party.San was a really cool festival. Their lighting setup was very good and the stage height was acceptable. Except for some ambient and atmospheric shots I used the 70-200 2.8 as standard lens. 70mm were good enough for full body shots of people in front of the stage, with 200mm being enough to reach the musicians in the back. Whereas daylight provided enough (but rather unattractive) light for stopping down, ISO200 and a shutter speed of 1/500s, ISO1600-ISO2000 was used with aperture wide open for the bands in the evening and night.

I really don’t remember how much Gigabyte in CF-Cards I carried with me, but I shot a total of 1359 pictures, everything in RAW. I used my normal laptop as storage device back in the car.

In a nutshell, the Party.San festival was a really pleasing experience. I like the shots I took back home from there, the bands provideded interesting shows and the weather wasn’t too bad. If you are into metal you should defenitely check it out.

Just a quick snap today, gotta hit the bed right now. This is from Party.San Festival 08, you can see some more on my flickr acc. Will be making some more updates soon, so stay tuned.

PS: And I’m thinking about a new Wordpress version and theme, or at least some widgets for the sidebar.

A quite unusual bandmix, a worthy headliner but not too much fun with the support acts: In the end, the “Chaos over Europe”-Tour was mixture of pros and cons which evend out eacht other. And in terms of photography, the LKA once again revealed more shadow than light.

Take the deep red wash, throw in a bit of bright and overexposing blue, just leave out the real rimlight from behind and use tons of fog to make everything go “Wuuuuuush!”, there you have the conditions for this concert. The pit conditions were the same as always. A small pit and stage at the height of your chest, which has its pros and cons. On the positive side, I can go very near in person and wide on my lens, I like this style. On the negative side, you always have a perspective which goes up, forcing you to directly aim into the rear lights. Flares are guaranteed, washing out every tiny bit of contrast, together with the omnipresent fog.

Because of that, I had to apply a quite huge amount of post processing, mainly fixing the colors, improving the exposure (light was also very dim, but the fog limited me to ISO2000, since it is very prone to noise) and tune the contrast. This way, I could give some of the pictures an interesting look.

17-50 was on the body most of the time, 70-200 came out for some of the closer portraits. In the end, a concert to forget. You know this feeling, just when you leave the pit, watch the concert and in an instant, the lighting situation improves? I mean, it was no big difference, but it just sucks. The venues in Stuttgart where the bands of my interest play have mainly uninteresting light and only few acts make it to the bigger venues like Schleyerhalle or Porsche-Arena. And even there you’ve got to be lucky to get really interesting lighting schemes and backgrounds.

More festival pics to come.

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I got 2 months of free time now, enough time to digg up some old stuff that should have been released weeks, no, months ago. Whatever, I’m going to start with the Zabbaduschder Open Air and will be continuing with more Pics from Summer Breeze, Party.San and a few concerts (and there are some new pics in sight with Kreator in march).

What should I tell you about the Zabbaduschder Festival: located in Urbach, next to a water cleaning are or something like that, fortunately not smelling, on a small grass area, very relaxed festival with only a few hundred people, I’m having a wonderful time there with a lot of beer and meat every year. Mostly smalle bands and a few headliners, smaller stage with a mid level lighting set.

Same procedure as every year, Mrs. Sophie. Because of the small stage I could use my preferred style of wide angle shooting, there was no 3 song limit, you could enter the reasonable sized pit whenever you wanted to (which allowed me to make my own schedule and spend a comfortable amount at the camping site, enjoying .. beer, you know the deal). For sure, the lights aren’t to great, ISO2000 with f2.8 lenses and normal exposure times as well as fighting against some red or blue color washes include, but all in all it wasn’t too bad for a festival of this size.

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And again fresh material this time. Deef, my “homies” Celestial Ashes and Abyzz with star guest Michelle from Hell, who jumped in for the originally booked Recapture, unleashed a shattering earthquake onto the Epplehaus, with me in front of the stage. More pics and infos after the jump

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And there was indeed a lot to see and to hear. While the concert was ecxcellent most of the time in musical terms, I also found quite pleasing working conditions. Although I needed some time to find my rhythm to get the pictures I wanted to have, I found lots of interesting motives. A big advantage of the Epplehaus is the not existing distance between the first row and the musicians. It is possible to get the camera 30cm away from the singer, together with a wide angle lense this produces very three dimensional images, one of my preferred photographic styles.

You won’t come far without a flash in the Epplehaus, but it is quite easy to use one because of the surroundings. Although the walls and the ceiling are painted in dark tones or black, you won’t need to much flash power since they are not too far away. In addition, the light set of the Epple seems improved, compared to my last visit, but I also might be wrong with this feeling. The thing I changed most this time was the angle of the flash. Its always possible to aim it at the ceiling, but especially if you try to capture some of the availabe lights (with exposures between 1/20 for the darker lit musicians and 1/100 for the guys in the front), you should also think about where you want to have your flash light coming from. If you get coloured rim lighting on one side of the musicians head, its very common to let your flash light come from the other side, if possible. This form of crosslighting produces a very three dimensional look. And don’t look for walls only. Why not use the musician next to our main target or a concert guest with a white shirt (although this is quite difficult to find within the metal gerne) as reflection area. Just think creative .. and make sure you don’t blind anyone ;)

Equipment as always: D300, 17-50 and 70-200 (from the second row, for some tight headshots or background control, which is always difficult in little, packed venues) with one SB600 on camera.