The Ivory Lounge

Wonderful event at the Ivory Lounge, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand the other night.  Anonymouz, the Hypnotics, Semi Leo, Malcolm Lakatani and Ross Devereux played a variety of songs to the delight of the people in the bar.  I'd gone with a friend from work and, of course, a camera.  It had been suggested some time ago that my previous images of performing musicians lacked emotion.

I was conscious of this criticism at the Ivory Lounge and really wanted to improve on my previous attempts.  I'm quite pleased with some of the images and would welcome your thoughts and comments.

The light wasn't the best.  I was shooting at ISO 3200 with my 50mm lens set at f1.8 or f2.8 most of the evening.  I'd set the camera to under-expose by about 2/3 stop and wonder now whether I should have set this a little higher.  Most shots look VERY red (due to the types of lights at the venue) and tend towards being over-exposed even though I was using spot metering.

Shots taken RAW have been easier to work with than my JPEG efforts.  Problem is that the speed with which I can write to my CF-card is seriously reduced when shooting RAW.

Conversion to "Black and White" has been done in Nikon's NX2.  I tried Nik's SilverEfex, but the effects from NX2 and the speed with which the conversion was made seemed best achieved in NX2.

The first shot in this post is of Jessica Matthews.  Gorgeous smile and a wonderful voice!  The second shot shows Ross Devereux, shot three is of Anonymouz, shot four is of Dylan Elise on drums and last, but not least, there's Semi Leo on bass guitar.  If you're interested, there's a few more shots are on flickr.

Don't forget to let me know what you think.