Mad T Party Photo Essay with the Sony A7 and the FE 70-200mm f/4 G lens - DAY

I haven't done a photo essay in a long time let alone a photo essay about the Mad T Party. I want to keep the words to a minimum and simply demonstrate how fun it is to shoot here, especially with the Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G lens. Thanks for stopping by.

The Beautiful Sheena Loza as Alice

Sheena Loza is a personal favorite for her "Rocker" type voice and stage presence

The cast singing Come on Eileen, a Save Ferris cover of Dexys Midnight Runner's 80's classic 

The rock god himself, Dan Franklin with Josh Disan and George from the 80z All Starz

Dani Kerry - one of the original Alices and another favorite of ours

We go out of our way to see Dani Kerry and Josh Disan perform together, even if it means wading through 5pm rush hour on a Friday Night

And when the day turns into night, spooky things happen. Stay tuned next week for my next photo essay on the Mad T Party.

Halloween Mad T Party photos to come next week

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Concert Photography Tip #2 - F is for Bokehlicious

The word Bokeh (pronounced bōˈkā or sometimes boh-kə) is often times misused to mean the background blur in an image, when in fact it is a Japanese term that describes the quality of the out-of-focus areas in an image. Many times you will hear photographers say that good bokeh is “creamy” and “circular”, whereas bad bokeh is known to be distracting or jittery.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter since the quality of background blur (for the sake of this post, I will just use bokeh) is purely subjective and its relative beauty fall on the eye of the beholder. But I digress. My photography tip for the day is about getting to know your lens' aperture/F-stop, focal length how it affects background blur/depth of field.  If you want to have that amazing bokehlicious look, here are some things to consider to help you get it:

A weekend with the Cheetah V850 and the Barebulb CL-360 (and more Importantly Nathan Shrake)

In my last post (see blog entry HERE), I was raving about how amazing the Cheetah/Godox lights are.  In theory, they are everything I could ask for in a portable lighting system:  they are light weight, powerful and user friendly. Last weekend, I had the pleasure of not only trying out these lights, but helping a friend with a photo shoot. This was a perfect opportunity to really see what these lights were capable of doing.  

For this shoot, being nimble was of utmost importance since we had to move from location to location.  Just in case you were curious, here's what I brought for the shoot:

1. 2 FT-16 Triggers/Receivers for myself and Rachel to remotely fire the lights
2. Cheetah CL-360 with the PB 960 batter pack
3. 2 Cheetah V850s
4. 2 lights stands 
5. 2 umbrella style soft boxes
6. OMD E-M1 shooting primarily with the Olympus 75mm f1.8

Our first location was at the Getty Museum, down here in Southern California.  It was an overcast day and the available light was flat and unflattering; a perfect opportunity for these lights to give us a bit of drama and dimension. I originally set up the CL-360 on a light stand and soft box, but was quickly asked to break it down as it was considered professional equipment and they had zero tolerance for tripods (clearly they don't know what a tripod is and were fine with us hand holding the flash).  I didn't know light modifiers were so threatening and professional.  Mind you, we were outdoors and not shooting anywhere near any paintings or sculptures (needless to say, it was a rule that had a number of holes in it). I decided to switch to the V850s as it was easier for our photo assistants to hold up and I had more options as far as zooming the flash in and out.