Alvin Love

01.7.2010

Alvin Love is an energy-packing adventurer. I first met Alvin back in June at a Chik-Fil-A here in town. We were at Kids’ Night dominating some chicken nuggets! And he was just about to head to Australia – for 4 months!!! He just up and left because he wanted to! Well, I ran into him again at a Christmas party. After the party we went to hear a techno DJ across town where we danced with a girl that was wearing a winter hat that looked like a bear head. Short story: Alvin Love attracts fun. So when he told me he was playing a show a few days later, I was excited!

He played at the Rutledge and it was my first time shooting there (details about that in the Notes section below). I’ve seen plenty of shows at The Rutledge but I’ve never seen an audience so pumped. People were actually dancing to Alvin’s hip-hop-infused songs. In Nashville. People in Nashville were dancing. To music. And they weren’t wasted.

It’s been three weeks since I shot the show and it strikes me that I’ve been very fortunate to see almost only high-energy, incredibly enjoyable music during that time. Alvin’s show was definitely part of that! The kid can bring it!

SHOOT NOTES

Interesting facts and what I learned.

I mentioned the crowd was dancing with the music, but you wouldn’t know it by my pictures. Why? Because I really didn’t take any photos of the crowd. I learned shortly after this show that including the crowd in performance photos has a powerful effect. The viewer of the photos can see that not only was the artist into it, but the fans were, too. My photo “checklist” for each show now includes some shots of the crowd.
I learned at this show just what a pain the butt red lights can be. From the audience, a red wash on the stage looks pretty cool, but it’s a nightmare for a photographer. The red seems to wash out every other color in the photo in a way that other colors don’t. I’ve read a number of articles about it since then and still don’t have solid answers as to why, but to fight it, people recommend underexposing the photo and even changing the white balance to a color temp of 2000-2700K (this is a setting in the MENU area of most camera’s settings). It’s usually ok to shoot auto white balance at shows, but not so with red. Even if you’re shooting RAW, I’ve read that setting a manual white balance will preserve tonality across the entire color spectrum if you capture it properly in camera and not in post. I’ll be trying these things at my next shoot.
As an example of what red lights can do to a camera using AWB (auto white balance), look at these photos below. The first is what came out of the camera, the second is my best attempt at post on the photo, and the third is obviously B&W. This is what I meant last post when I talked about using B&W to cover up an otherwise poor photo.
I learned my editing skills need to get upped. I need to keep watching more and more videos. I should be able to do better at salvaging the photo above. I know better photographers would be able to and I want to do that caliber of work. Of course, I want to be able to capture it in-camera the right way so all that editing isn’t necessary!!
I severely underexposed tons of the photos in this shoot (which is why I don’t have very many posted). Part of it was due to not reviewing my photos on the camera enough and part because I was using a metering mode on my camera that I didn’t understand at the time.
Alvin Love is the man!