Working with Low Light Venues
Small venues provide an opportunity for fans to enjoy an intimate musical experience. With little significant separation between the artists and their audience, the fans and artists are at times part of the same performance. I’ll have to blog about that down the road.
On the downside these places make it difficult to get a good images. The stage lighting is often simple, flat and not very bright which requires one to use 6400 ISO or higher along with low shutter speeds and large apertures. As a result the percentage of good images is fairly low.
After shooting available light for one show and getting 10-20 usable shots I started thinking of options. I could bring a single camera mounted flash or hold one off to the side. That would work but the lighting would be flat and drop off quickly and I really wanted to get everyone in the band and not disappoint anyone.
Fortunately I had some number of Pocket Wizard TT5 remote triggers, multiple Canon 550ex Speedlites and a bunch of mounting hardware already that I had accumulated over the years on various assignments and projects. My plan all along was to have a portable studio setup for my portraiture work but they worked out even better for lighting a stage.
The image above is from my first attempt at lighting a venue. I got pretty lucky with this first attempt. As it turns out there was a lounge area on a level above stage with spots where I could mount the flash equipment and make changes as I experimented and since I didn’t know what I needed initially that was a big win for me.
I ended up lighting the band via two remote Canon Speedlites mounted above and in front of stage triggered by flexTT5 Pocket Wizards. Ambient light was very low (ISO 12800 1/100@f2.8) so all the lighting you see is from the two Speedlites. Without the two strobes the image would be almost black. I shot at ISO 1250, f8 for most of these. I mounted the strobes far back enough so I had the option of spilling light onto the audience, depending on where I pointed the strobes and how I set them up.
There are a lot of variables here so it doesn’t make any sense to tell you exactly what the lighting setup was and frankly I don’t keep track. Instead I keep the options in my head and experiment at each venue. The goal was to make it seem like the lighting came from normal stage lighting. I knew I wanted to use at least one color gel to give it a stage lighting feel but needed to experiment with some combination of the following
- 2 Speedlites with separate battery packs (improves recycle time and allows more shots), Pocket Wizard flexTT5 transceivers.
- Red gel on camera left for sure. You can see the red glow on the fans and cast over the stage
- Probably a very light orange gel on camera right strobe to keep the overall light warm
- Honl 1/4 or 1/8 grid on one or both (or none) of the strobes. That allows me to focus the light in addition to simply zooming the flash head
- Zooming the flash head to cut down on light spill over and to increase light on the subjects
