Together with Kamelot Xandria were playing at the Zeche. The last time I saw the Band live is now quite a while back… to be exact a little more then 5 years. At that time they just started out and where on tour with their debut album. A lot has happened since then and their where a couple of line up changes. The biggest difference since seeing them back in 2004 is probably the new singer Kerstin Bischof. Kerstin seems to be a completly different type then the previous singer Lisa. While Lisa had a more laid back stage attitude, Kerstin is way more active and moving all over the small area that the band had. She also did quite some headbanging which actually looked pretty elegant.

Shooting Notes
It was dark… really really dark. During the set of Xandria their was really little stage light and nearly no front light at all, worst part though was the fact, that we weren’t allowed to use flash, which made shooting the Band really hard. I got the ISO up to 1600 and was shooting wide open at a shutter speed of as little as a 1/100. In a normal Portrait Situation a 1/100 is not bad, but the band was moving all the time, which made that not really fun. Next to that to get to a 1/100 I had to underexpose the shots by 1-1/2 stops and pull up the exposure afterwards in post. After reviewing the shots on the computer most of them turned out to be blurry, but I was shooting in high speed continuous mode so there where one or two in each set that where usable.

I was shooting in front of the stage with the Canon 24-70 f2.8, after the first three songs where over I pulled out the 70-200 and got some more images out of the audience. Do to the fact that there is a balcony of sort in the Zeche, I was able to get some nice shots out of that. During the shoot I was really missing the Tokina 11-16 which is still out for repairs, the 24-70 was just not wide enough in a lot instances and the extra mm would have made this much sweeter.

Tags: 19.06.2009, Bochum, Matrix, Xandria

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