Live music
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Britt says …
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| Last Saturday I shot a hardcore show upstairs of the Palladium in Worcester, MA. Perfect place to shoot. I shot with my SB-800 on a TTL cord, doing the typical slow shutter, rear curtain flash shots. |
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| Here is a shot I took a band called A Loss for Words. I used the flash as shown above. |
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| I turned the flash off, changed a few settings on the camera, and shot with the available light. |
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| The two shots are of the same band, but have a totally different feel. The first gives me the local hardcore band performing to a crowd of rough and tough loyal locals. The second one feels like the band is performing at a stadium with a bunch of teenie boppers who idolize this guy with blonde hair who can sing. More decisions, decisions. |
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Scott says …
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Somebody’s been thinking a lot about ethics. That’s a good thing.
While I don’t view your live music scenario as a weighty ethical dilemma, it does seem to me that you could use some parameters in which to frame your ethical choices.
My advice? Consider the audience.
If the audience for your pictures is the band and its fans, then I think you could shoot them however you want. However, if the audience is the readership of a general-interest publication that likely knows nothing about the band or hardcore shows or how all that looks, then you need to start considering the truthfulness of what your pictures show.
In your example, I think both pictures are fine and don’t cross any lines. But back to the parameters.
When I was starting out as a photojournalist and was trying to figure out how to think about shooting ethically, I used to do a little mental exercise. I would pretend that my entire readership — all 20,000 of them (or whatever) — was standing behind me as I took the picture. Seeing exactly what I saw. Would those people feel like what I put in the paper was an honest interpretation of what we all saw? If I could answer yes to that question, I was doing OK.
My little ethical exercise — pretending to have a crowd of witnesses — was a way to keep myself honest. I like it because it doesn’t get hung up on burning an dodging and f-stops and saturation, it’s just a simple gut-check: Am I trying to deceive people? If I am, that’s bad. But if I’m trying to show them a convincing representation of the world in an interesting way, well … that’s my job as their local newspaper photographer.
