Nightclub Photography
Birthday boy
Last weekend I was invited along to a have a few drinks and celebrate a friends birthday. He also asked me to bring the camera along and take some shots of his makeup. He decided to finally get around to doing his version of Chad’s stage make up from Mudvayne. Happy to oblige I went along with camera in tow.
Not wanting to be weighed down I just took my main body and a 50mm prime lens. A good choice as I would soon find out. I got some basic shots of friends and documented the night. I was originally planning on leaving the camera in one of the cars but didn’t feel safe doing so around Melbourne. Somewhat sad realisation but none the less a sound one.
So there I was in DV8 (a metal club in Melbourne) with a camera and plenty of space on the card. So what do I do I take some shots. In the middle of a dark club with wildly changing lighting setups and strobes, and me with no flash to control the exposure. The first couple were kind of ordinary until I realised that I can just treat it like ambient. I put it on f1.4 and let the camera work out the rest.
Dance Floor
It is one of the many times when fortuitous mistakes can be your friend, I started to experiment. Long exposures, short exposures, high ISO, black & white and a fair bit of video.
Overall I found that shooting video with about -1ev compensation gave me the impression of being in a dark room without losing all detail when the lighting changed. Add to that the smoke machine and you get some cool effects.
Most of the clips were not that impressive to look at, the lighting was out of sync to the frame and the focus was all over the place. But a 30 second clip gave me 900 frames to choose from. If 899 are a complete waste I’m still coming out ahead.
From my initial plan of taking a few snaps and being done with it, I now know that i can take the camera into some pretty tricky situations and produce results that stand out. Overall a great night and productive too.
More photos from the night can be found here.