Last week, I posted a photo of Troy Turner, Ike & Tina Turner’s nephew, singing away the blues at the Blues Club on New Orleans’s famed Bourbon Street. One of my students saw the post and asked me how I made the shot, so I thought I’d tell you here on my blog. So here goes!
When a friend and I first walked into the club, the waiter ushered us to a seat close to the stage, but on the side. That didn’t make for a very good perspective, so I asked to sit instead at a table that was farther away, but slightly closer to center. Since I didn’t want to really stick out so much by standing and moving around to take my shots, it was important to choose the best position at the beginning.
I put my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens onto my Canon 5D Mark II camera, zoomed into 200mm, opened the aperture wide to f/2.8 and set the ISO to 1600. On manual, I selected a shutter speed of 1/80 seconds. (I don’t remember if I came up with the 1/80 shutter speed right away. I probably experimented with a few shutter speeds, chimping along the way, to find the slowest possible shutter speed needed to get a sharp image with the proper exposure, to come up with 1/80 seconds.) I also might have been bracing myself by setting my elbows on the table, but I don’t remember. Here’s what I got of the singer who opened for Troy Turner. The camera would probably say this image is underexposed, but well, it should be. It was dark in there, after all, and I want to retain the mood of the scene.
After zooming in and inspecting the image on the back of my camera, I decided that 1/80 seconds wasn’t fast enough. So I upped my ISO to 3200 and my shutter speed to 1/160 seconds, resulting in these images of Troy Turner.
OK, fast forward to back at the hotel/home. I shot the images in RAW – so in color. I converted the first image to black & white in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and cloned out one distracting small spot of light in the left hand side of the frame. The next two images of Troy Turner, again, I have color and monochrome versions. Using the local adjustment brush in Lightroom, I burned (made darker) some of the lighter areas of the images that I found distracting.
And folks, that’s it! I think this shoot was pretty straightforward!
Nice work as Always Irene…