I was super lucky to be invited by Upstairs at Hanna’s, a fantastic local band in South Wales, to get some BTS documentary photography of their recording session at One Louder Studios in Newport.
I’ve been really wanting to shoot more and more music focused photography lately. It’s a space that I feel has a lot of parallels with photography and filmmaking and it’s interesting to see how the artists navigate their way through it. I used to do a lot of live music stuff a few years ago and I feel it’s been something that’s been sorely missing as a creative outlet.
I really put the Fujifilm X-Pro 2 through it’s paces regarding ISO and autofocus performance in low light conditions. I’ll start with the pluses. I think at 6400 ISO it performed fantastically. There is for sure noise in the image, but it looks super pleasing to my eye. And I always add a bunch of grain anyways! It all just seemed to meld together and gave it more of the filmic look that I have/always will spend a lifetime trying to achieve in my digital photography. I didn’t really want to go past 6400 ISO though as I had a feeling it might start turning to mush. It’s been pretty weird switching over to Fuji from Sony. I used to be able to just rock the ISO on the scroll wheel and pretty much never ever worry about it being too high. Both ways of shooting are very different. But, as is the reason I wanted to switch, shooting this way on the Fujifilm feels a little more analog. Maybe that sounds pretentious, who knows.
Now with the negatives (excuse the pun). The AF performance in low light was pretty spotty. But I’m not too worried. One because I’ve been manually pulling focus for video for as long as I can remember, and two I kinda knew the X-Pro 2 wasn’t an autofocus beast when I bought it. So very quickly during this session I ended up switching the focus dial to M (the dial I love btw) and just used single shot back button AF when there was enough light.
To help me manual focus I used the peaking set to blue on high which was absolutely fantastic. I loved how it disappeared from the screen when I half pressed the shutter so I could get a much better look at my composition. I feel like focus peaking is unfortunately a necessary era of modern manual focusng. I can’t live without it, but if I could then I definitely would as I do find it distracting on the screen. The fujifilm cameras have a happy medium though where you can make it disappear as you half press the shutter.
I also edited these images in Lightroom slightly more poppy and colourful than I usually would. I just felt like it fit the story and vibe of the day. The pink and blue tube lights that you see in frame a lot were brought in by me and then, luckily, the strip lights on the walls and the ceiling lights could be controlled by dimming and changing colour at the studio.
Anyways that’s probably enough of a ramble on here. Fujifilm X-Pro 2 for low light band performance = GREAT
If you, or anyone you know, has a band that would like any kind of photography and/or video, please do let me know and send them my way!
