Hi

Well, a year is over since my last thread here with my concert photos of the Montreux Jazz Festival 2009.

This years edition opened today, an opportunity for me to get back, and give me another try at concert photography, not always an easy task.

Having no photo pass, I am only allowed to take photos at the free concerts, so less known artists.

I started today with a concert from "Craig Stephens Band". In fact, a bar along the quais of Montreux where the festival takes place, added a scene within the bar. Unfortunately, the mounted the scene in such a way, that the musicians are strongly backlight nearly the whole afternoon, which does not make it an easy task.

2nd July 2010


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Pepe Lienhard, at radio interview

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Big Fat Mama, Poland

The strangest group so far

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Well, these were the photos of the 11th and 12th July.

Comments and critiques are welcome.

[tcom]

13th July

The Jamborines

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Sweethearts, Australia

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BRONZE Dou-Shin, Japan

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That's all for the 13th July.

Comments and critiques are welcome.

[tcom]

14th July

The Motowns, Switzerland

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Melonmoon, Switzerland

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DA*16-50

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Anach Cuan, Switzerland

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15th July

Jeff Sparkle and the Shiny Shoes, Switzerland

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DA*16-50


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Stallfish

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16th July

Entretemps, Switzerland
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Jean-Lou Treboux Group

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Plugin Babes, Switzerland

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17th July

Pullup orchestra, Schweiz

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Well, that's all for this year's edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival.

The festival allowed me to discover quite a lot of excellent musicians whom I did not know before. Quite a lot of them contacted me to know if there is any chance for them to get my photos for their websites.

From a photographic point of view, I have got used to leave the aperture mode for the manual exposure mode in difficult light conditions. When the contrast is extremely high, for example musicians with a white shirt in the sun in front of a black wall, the exposure metering does not work that well anymore. So, I tried the manual exposure, defining both aperture and shutter speed myself. While it does not decrease the number of photos I took, it increased dramatically the correct exposed ones.

AF was not a problem, the K-7 was always fast enough with DA*50-135 and DA*200. I truly appreciated these f/2.8 lenses for concert photography. While they are not small, they allow you to get noticed by the musician who posed sometimes for my camera. They are also bright enough to let the AF remain fast enough even in low light situations.

As for the WB, I started to set it manually. Even if WB is not really the problem when shooting RAW, it does reduce greatly to post processing when the WB is already set correctly. The K-7 (like K-x and K20) do have a very nice feature to set the WB. When entering the WB menu, the camera displays the last photo taken, and you see the immediate effect on the photo when going through the different presets. If no preset works, you can still select a custom WB and scroll through the Kelvins to set it correctly.

Thank you all for following this thread and commenting. The festival was great fun, and I do hope these photos do show a little bit of it.

The 45th edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival is scheduled from 1st to 16th July 2011, this will be for me another opportunity for concert photography.