More Performance Photographs: Mary Fahl
by William Lulow
I have written about my techniques for photographing musicians in concert settings before. A week or so ago, I had the pleasure of photographing Mary Fahl, former lead singer with a group called The October Project. I had done my research prior to the shoot and was aware of the best angles from which to make my images, so I really had a plan going into the club. Then, as I began to get my light readings, I noticed that the stage lights were quite a bit brighter than they normally were for this venue. My exposures were: ISO 2000, f/7.1 at 1/125th of a second. So there was no trouble getting big, sharp images. A couple of images were actually made at ISO1250 with similar shutter speed and aperture settings. (I think I opened up to f/6.3 for a couple.).
I always check the light conditions before I begin any performance shoot because you never know who might be adjusting the stage lights and even adding or subtracting a couple here or there. When I noticed the increased amount of light, I knew I would be able to enlarge the shots to include just the performer’s face, if I wanted.
Here are a couple of the shots:
The man (actually playing the piano) is producer John Lissauer. He was quite a bit further back behind Mary and consequently had much less light on him. I was able to take care of some of the difference in post-processing.
But here the details will stand up to quite a bit of enlargement, even if I wanted to make 16×20″ prints of them. If you think of some of these as sections of a 35mm film frame, you can get an idea of the amount of enlargement they can handle. There is some grain (we call it noise today), but we referred to it as “sharpness in grain.” If you shoot in lower light conditions and you bump up your ISO settings, you are always going to add some grain to the images. But the extra sensitivity will allow you to obtain greater depth-of-field and increase overall sharpness. All of these were shot with a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens on a cropped sensor camera. So the lens was really acting more like a 135mm lens. But the images are certainly sharp enough for any use.
