This is our first post here. Wish us good luck! We are going to jump right in. So here we go…

This past weekend has been a lot of fun. One of the highlights was going to this local open air music event in San Diego, California.

Now I (Raj here) have never heard of the artists on that list there. It wasn’t the music that I was after. It was the atmosphere that goes with it. (Confession: I kind of enjoyed some of the groovy tunes I heard there though. I found myself tapping my foot. And that’s the most I have ever danced)

I had never photographed a music show before. So I thought I would go and see if I can capture anything interesting. I had this feeling the light at such events would be interesting and is worth checking out. Sure enough, there is a lot of dramatic light. Difficult, but dramatic. And there is a lot of energy in crowd as well, which is what I focused on capturing.

To make things interesting, I created a slideshow of the shots from the event set to some background music by Debashish Bhattacharya.

This particular track called “Shringar” has a bit of a doozy and lazy feeling to it. I thought that will go well with the mood here. Amantran from that album is also amazing. Well, amazing is relative. So take that with a grain of salt.

Here are some of my favorite shots from this series. Click through for a better view on our website.

I used lens flare in the first and second shots to my advantage. And the f2.8 gave that circles of light. Also, I deliberately chose high-key exposure for the first one. That’s one advantage of always shooting in manual – you constantly have to think about what you are doing. I noticed a major shift in my thought process after switching to predominantly using manual mode.

For these next two shots, I noticed the rim light effect coming from behind. I knew they would make good b&w or sepia tones. I also deliberately chose low-key exposure here to get dramatic mood.

Well, that’s it for the first post. Thanks for stopping by and staying until here. We hope to see you back.

-Raj & Archana.