Sonata Arctica – Dortmund, FZW – 02.12.2009
Posted by Daniel at 8. Dezember 2009 | Category Concert, Live, Photography, Pictures
Finally it was time for Sonata Arctica to enter the stage. The last time I saw the Band is now quite a while back, so I was excited to hear some new material. I don’t know if it was just me, but as soon as the Band started playing I got bored pretty fast. Somehow there was no energy in the show and the band was pretty slow. Also the setlist seemed to just contain midtempo songs. The people in the first couple of rows disagreed with me though, judging by their cheers, so I guess it just wasn’t my day. I was staying for another couple of songs after I got out of the pit shooting the Band, but decided then to leave, because I couldn’t get into the mood of the show.
Really big thanks goes out to Jani of ‚Dice of Fate‘ who got me set up this evening and Antti Hokkala and Pasi Kauppinen of Winterborn to arrange the Pass!
Shooting Notes
The light in the FZW was just weird. As I entered the hall, I was still in a happy mood looking at the stage, because it seemed to be quite bright and the lightrig looked pretty good. As soon as the show started and I was in the pit, I had trouble getting my head around the light. It was actually way darker then I suspected and there wasn’t that much front light. I was shooting wide open at f2.8 and a shutter speed between 1/125 and 1/160 which was pretty much on the verge I like operating on, also the minimum ISO I was using was 800 and I had to bumb that up a lot of times to 1600 to get enough light on the sensor (normally I try to stay at least below 1250 to not get over the Canon 40Ds Unity Gain ISO). This on the other end meant quite some work in postprocessing getting the noise in the images under control without destroying the sharpness and details in the files.
I was using the Canon EF 24-70 f2.8 for the most parts and got the Canon EF 70-200 f2.8 out during the last song to get some nice close-ups. The IS was a lifesaver here, shooting at the long end of the lens with really steady results. There are a lot of people that question the necessarity of image stabilization when doing concert photography… I’m always the opinion that it is worth the extra money, especially at small clubs.
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