Some friends and colleagues of mine put on a comedy evening at the Guanabara Club London in June, and I went along as a favour to them and because I love shooting performers on stage doing their thing. Standup comedy tends to be just a person on a stage on their own, talking, so the challenge is to get the viewer to engage with the image and convey the performer’s personality using just the right moments in their performance, framed in an complementary way. I also like to try and relate the performer to the audience where I can so it’s not always just the lone figure on a stage – although those shots are great too.
As it happens the Guanabara Club is a fantastic looking venue so that took care of that side of things nicely, and the comedians themselves went down very well too. Here’s a selection of my favourite shots from the evening, including one of my favourite comedians, Dane Baptiste. You can find out more about my event photography here.
Notes / the geeky bit
This was one of the first few times I’d taken out my new X100S for a ‘job’ to use alongside my Nikon D700 and I learnt a few things about it, such as to turn down the High ISO Noise Reduction to the lowest it can go or else it smudges out detail really badly, especially on scenes like this where I needed a high ISO a lot. Even the lowest, -2, is still not ‘Off’ but it looks a hell of a lot better and perfectly useable.
I shot JPG only and learned that I should shoot RAW+JPG with it for paid jobs, at least for a while, to give me that safety net of fixing exposure or white balance; the JPGs have actually got surprising latitude in Lightroom – particularly exposure, and you can just about get away with small white balance adjustments too – but a RAW adjustment will always be more accurate. It’s just getting those RAWs to look anywhere near as good as the JPGs the X100S produces that’s the issue. I’ve made a couple of different Presets that get me very, very close to them, to the point where I doubt someone else making a glancing comparison would ever tell the difference. But I’d know ;)
One key issue that Lightroom has with the X100S RAW files is with very bright light in the pink-purple-magenta spectrum: it blows out horribly, turning black in some cases. The same RAW file in a couple of other converters such as Capture One turns out fine, so it’s not the camera data. I discovered that by dropping the saturation of all colours in the LR Camera Calibration panel, then pumping saturation back up in the Basic panel was a quick, dirty but effective fix, but I wish somebody at Adobe would have a look at some X100S RAW data and see if they can handle it better in the initial conversion LR makes.
And that’s it – thanks for reading!
