the show. The lighting director can be your best
friend or your worst enemy because he or she is
the person in control of the lighting. The lighting
director is only interested in creating the right
lighting for the band and giving the audience
something interesting to look at. For example, in
Figure 5-14, the lighting was interesting enough
that I chose to make it the subject of the image.exception is when shooting in bars, and then
there is usually no limit, making it possible to get
a lot of practice in during a single show. When it
comes to general events, this could mean photo-
graphing a parade or a birthday party, or red car-
pet arrivals. Now, while all these might seem very
different, they all have certain time restrictions
on the photography. Take a parade, for example;
it moves down the parade route and usually
doesn’t stop much, and even if it does, it usually
gets moving pretty quickly. That means that the
subjects are not in front of the camera for very
long, giving you a limited time to shoot.
Photographing a birthday party might seem like
you have a lot of time, but similar to weddings,
there are certain moments that you want to cap-
ture and they come and go quite fast. For exam-
ple, there is only one shot at getting the birthday
boy or girl blowing out the candles on their cake.
As for red carpet events, they move really fast,
with the celebrities being ushered along at a good
clip. At the most, you might get from 30 seconds
to a minute with the subject in front of you, and
then you are competing with a group of other
photographers who are all trying to get the same
shot. When I photographed actor Ron Perlman at
the arrivals for the Syfy/Entertainment Weekly
party (see Figure 5-13), the average time each star
was in front of the cameras was about 30 seconds,
which meant making sure that the camera set-
tings were dialed in before the first arrival.
Stage lighting
A great light show can greatly enhance the entire
concert experience. Many bands put a lot of
thought into their light shows, and the bigger
bands and shows may even have a dedicated
lighting director who handles the lights during
ABOUT THIS PHOTO When photographing red carpet arrivals,
I made sure that my exposure settings were set before the first actor
stepped in front of the camera. The settings never changed because the
light never changed, but the shooting time was very limited. Taken at
1/250 second, f/5.0, and ISO 1250.5-13