Sonata Arctica – Rock Hard Festival 2010

Daniel — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:05:30 +0000

I wasn’t really excited to see Sonata Arctica after been on their last Club-Tour, but I still was hopeful that they would been able to play a better show this time. Unfortunatly I my hope was disappointed. Again the show was pretty boring and dull and the Band wasn’t able to entertain all of the Amphitheater, which was pretty obvious by the number of people leaving. Nonetheless there where a couple of people in front of the stage, which really enjoyed the show.

If you want to see more of Sonata Arctica, check out my Pictures of them at Dortmund, FZW – 02.12.2009

Shooting Notes
This festival I wanted to keep my shutter speeds as low as possible so I used higher ISO values to compensate for that. With Sonata Arctica I went with ISO 400 which enabled me to shoot at 1/400 to 1/800 of a second at an aperture of f4. The sun was standing low by this time and shinning on the roof which gave it an extra boost.

Sonata Arctica - Rock Hard Festival 2010

Sonata Arctica – Dortmund, FZW – 02.12.2009

Daniel — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:15:17 +0000

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.