Bon Jovi Show – June 2014

The “Australian Bon Jovi Show” are a brilliant tribute show band from Melbourne Australia.

These photos are from their show at The Espy in St Kilda on Friday June 27th 2014.

These guys are the real deal and play all of Bon Jovi’s Greatest Hits with great gusto and perfect detail.

The crowd totally loved this band and were up dancing and singing until the early hours of the morning!

A full Flickr Gallery of Photos can be viewed here:

Flickr Photo Gallery of Bon Jovi Show June 27th 2014

Further information about Cuckoo For Caca can be found at their Facebook Page:

Australian Bon Jovi Show Facebook Page

 
 

EQUIPMENT:

Sony Alpha A-77 Camera
Tamron 17-50mm F2.8

Sony Alpha A-55 Camera
Tamron 24-70mm F2.8

Sony HVL-F43M Flash

Gary Fong Gamma Blade Diffuser

Gary Fong Collapsible Lightsphere Diffuser

Panasonic Lumix LX7 Compact Camera

(Note that this write up is mostly the same as we did for “Cuckoo For Caca”, as both bands played at The Espy on June 27th).

This shoot was in the Gershwin Room at The Espy where they usually have great lighting, but heartbreakingly nobody was working the lighting desk, and the lights were just set on “set and forget”!

This meant that the Drummer and Keyboard Player were in the shadows a lot of the time. Not at all ideal conditions for getting good photos.

The drummer was actually impossible to get a shot of, and was basically in complete darkness.

Only the singer was in reasonable good lighting, and the Bass Player was also forward on the stage in reasonable light some of the time.

The Sony A-77 had to be set to an unfavourably high ISO of 1600, Shutter 1/100, and Aperture full open at 2.8. This resulted in quite grainy shots, which were dull and dark.

The Sony A-77 really only works well up to ISO 800, because it is not a great low light camera like the Nikon cameras are. However on ISO 1000 with the Flash, and a shutter speed of 125, the A-77 is unbeatable for “Party People” shots.

In addition, a lot of the band shots were not crisp in focus, which was perhaps due to the dull light, or else due to the band members moving around a bit at the shallow Aperture of F2.8.

Auto White balance was used, because the guitarist’s pure white Kramer seemed to be coming our reasonably white during the shoot. However, once unloaded from the camera, the faces on people did have a pinkish purple hue, and so maybe we should have manually set the WB onto the white guitar. Something to try out another time.

A lot of gamma exposure had to be added in Photoshop, to reduce the background grains, as well as heavy use of the smart sharpen filter.

In addition, most of the shots were de-saturated and adjusted using Hue/Saturation in Photoshop. Shots with horrible red light on them were converted to a small set of black and whites in the Album.

“People Pictures” were taken with the Flash mainly on 1/8 Power, Manual, and 50mm wide beam. The shots were overly bright out of the camera, but then had Photoshop Exposure Gamma added into them to tone down the brightness and bring in some facial colour.

The Gary Fong Blade Diffuser did a great job as usual, and there was only a small amount of white flash burn on nose tips and cheeks, which we fixed in Photoshop using the Rubber Stamp Clone Tool, set to a transparency of 65%.

The People Pictures were left quite bright, because on energy saving mobile phones they look best when made quite bright on the PC.

 

The Sony A-55 was set to Auto SCN “Sports Mode” and used with the bigger Tamron 24-70mm lens, which seems to be a god combination and produced some great close up shots.

The Panasonic Lumix LX7 produced a few good crowd pictures, but does not seem to be working so well of late. I need to go through the CD Advanced Manual and see if some of the settings have gone astray.

 

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Enjoy,
Passy

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