Jazz at The Farm

I’ve started trying to pick up more random assignments just to take some out of the norm photos, for me at least. When I saw that there was a story being done on the jazz scene in Athens I jumped on it. I mean, who doesn’t want to listen to live jazz while they’re taking photos?

This assignment was right after a baseball game for me so I had to rush over to the venue, Farm 255, downtown. I somehow found parking relatively close to Farm and grabbed my gear out of my trunk since I didn’t feel like carrying a bag (it made for some funny looks as I walked through the streets downtown with cameras). When I got to the venue I realized that I had forgotten how dark the jazz shows at Farm 255 were. All that was lighting the outdoor stage at night was some Christmas lights that were strung around in a pleasing manner.

I immediately forgot about using my 70-200 and pulled out my broken 50 f/1.8. I say broken, but the lens itself works fine. The only problem is that somehow the AF motor was broken in it, so it no longer auto focuses. How, I have no idea, I baby that lens because I know it is plastic and fragile, but in not using it for a while I guess it broke… sitting on my shelf must have been rough on the poor little lens. Anyway, out of desperation I set my camera to its max of ISO 3200, or H on the camera. A combination of that and f/1.8 gained me a shutter speed of 1/30s, kind of difficult to capture human movement with slow enough to have to concentrate on holding steady with a 50mm lens, but it was usable. I completely gave up on white balance after a couple shots and playing around with white balance in camera and just decided to go black and white. I mean, color gives the photos an interesting look, but they are just waaaaay too orange for my taste. Here is what I mean.

Not a bad frame to be honest… the super warm tone gives it a cool feel, but I feel like black and white did a better job of cleaning up the noisiness and gave the photos an even stronger feel. Yeah, you heard me, I used black and white in pictures… For those of you who I haven’t talked to this about, I am a huge proponent of using color all the time and am not the biggest fan of black and white. The world is in color, use it. Here though, I felt like I was forced to use black and white, and it isn’t a picture of a poor person of starving children, so I guess it is okay.

I started with the drummer. He has a nice aura about him and I liked that I could frame him within his drums, so I went to work.

I wanted to play with different angles of him and that is what I came up with. Probably one of my more favorite shots from the whole shoot. I wish he was a little bit sharper but he is sharp enough for my purposes. I also shot a normal horizontal shot of him just to see what I could do. I had a few good ones, but this is the one I liked the best.

I moved on to the bassist because he seemed to be very stoic, but would make good faces every now and then. Sometimes he got super intense so I tried to work an angle of that.

I was a little too tight and would have liked to keep the whole bass in the frame, but the face is good enough to make up for it I think. That and I was a little limited to where I could be and still shoot cleanly.

I shot him a bit more and ended up with probably my most favorite shot of the night. He looks like he is so happy and I got a little bit of rimlight around his head. I just like it.

That just looks like jazz euphoria to me.

The guitar player was last, I found him kind of boring, to be honest, but he did have poofy hair, so that made up for his other shortcomings. He never really went crazy or made any awesome faces, he just played, but I managed to make a nice frame of him.

You may be wondering why I didn’t shoot anything wider of the whole group or of some interactions of the band members… well, that was because one, I had just a 50mm lens to work with and would have had to use some crazy foot zoom, and two there was a support beam right in the middle of the stage kind of in front of the drummer and that would have not looked too great. Granted, I could have worked around it, but it was my first time and it was late, so I took what I could get.

Either way, I had a good time shooting my first concert, of sorts, and look forward to the next one. Maybe then I’ll have a 50 1.4 so it’ll actually be somewhat sharp wide open. We’ll see.