Had a blast photographing the Underground Music Showcase for Red Bull Sound Select Presents: Denver last weekend and assembled a quick gallery of some of my favorites from the evening. A series of four great local and national talents graced the stage that night, including Wild High, Astronautalis, Tanlines and People Under the Stairs.
Considering the outdoor venue, variable lighting of the slowly setting sun and persistent threat of rain throughout the course of the evening, I opted to pair my Nikon D4s bodies with more portable Nikon Speedlights in lieu of my full Dynalite strobe setup. I ran four Speedlights matched to Pocketwizard TT5 Transceivers, thus was able to quickly adjust lighting on the fly as the sun continued to set and still match ambient lighting conditions to make the most of the venue.
The front two strobes, stage right and stage left, were configured for traditional TTL (a great benefit of the Pocketwizard TT5, with beta firmware newly updated for the Nikon D4s!), whereas the rear two strobes (visible in many of the images) were configured with red and blue gels respectively and configured to fire manually at between 1/4 and 1/8 strength, thus backlighting would be someone constant even if the strobe was flaring directly into the lens, which I think provides a nice look for concert photography, evoking traditional music lighting.
I was extremely pleased with the results, not only the power and duration of the Speedlights (Sanyo Eneloop rechargeables lasting 2+ hours and hundreds of images!), but also the ease of setup/breakdown, as well as weatherproofing (simple ziploc bags over each speed light and TT5 combo). As you can see, some of the images are from a very decent range of 100+ meters and the strobes were still reliably firing. The combined versatility and power of the Nikon Speedlights and Pocketwizard TT5 system continues to impress me these last few weeks!
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