Concert Photos of Tree on The Rock

A couple of weekends ago my friend Phil came to visit. A funny fact, the place I now stay in used to be his as he used to be here in Krakow before I moved here (and left at the same time I came…coincidence. I’ll let you decide). He was coming to visit friends and perform with his band (tree on the rock). So I of course took my camera along and decided to take some photos.
I debated which camera I should take but I was really eager to use my Fuji x100t and practice/experiment with my Fuji EF-X20. Using a flash on friends at night/ at concerts is a great way to get to grips with your flash in a safe place…and potentially blind your friends as well, when they annoy you.

Here are a few photos from before the concert [including some on film]

Anyway, shooting at a concert. The venue was absolutely tiny. Only about 20 people (including the band) and barely enough room to stand. I quickly knew that I wouldn’t really be able to move around (though In hindsight, maybe I could have pushed that a bit more. Just like in street photography, you can often get away with more than you think). To get some more interesting effects, I decided to try and play with using the flash and with having a long shutter. I had seem some other photographers works where you can get some interesting lines of light, and yet still have very obvious subjects in your images.

It’s also the only way to get cool sunburst and not splodges of light in the background.

The flash was very important as there was little light coming from in front of the band (unlike most venues). To actually see their faces in the images, I needed to control and provide the light on my own. It’s probably one of the biggest arguments for flash. Without the flash, I would only have silhouettes. Don’t get me wrong, I made use of that for some images, but I wanted to show their faces off as well.

So there you have it. Not perfect and there’s a lot I’m going to try out if I do any more concert photography, but still with only 35mm and a little flash, I think I did a pretty good job of it.

Originally published at Chris J Wilson.