Dazzle Jazz Concert Photography Workshop
For a change in pace, I signed up to take a concert photography workshop down at Denver’s Dazzle Restaurant and Lounge through an organization called Gift of Jazz. One of my favorite jazz radio station’s (KUVO) DJs was being featured as a co-instructor and come to find out she is quite the concert photographer too!
The workshop was divided out into three sessions. The first session of the workshop covered camera settings, lens preferences, and the ethics of shooting concerts (sort of the do’s and don’ts if you will) so as to not distract the musicians, nor interfere with the audience’s enjoyment of the show.
The second session was a live concert shoot this past Tuesday night with the 9th and Lincoln Orchestra performing all new compositions written by the graduating class of the Gift of Jazz school. How cool is it to have your composition actually performed by a professional big band on your graduation night?!?!
For this session, I knew the lighting would be difficult at best and I worried about not having “fast glass” as they say. So I rented a Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 lens from the good folks at Borrow Lenses, just for this event. I shot with this lens and my 80-200mm f/2.8 lens I use for event photography and let me tell you, I am in love with this 85mm lens! Beautiful doesn’t even come close to describing the images I got from that lens, as I’m a sucker for crisp subjects and beautiful blur (bokeh) surrounding my subjects.
The third and final session is coming up this Saturday. Participants are to select half dozen of their best images from Tuesday night’s live shoot, (I took 470 images over the course of 4 songs!) where Marc Sabatella, Wendy Fopeano (the two workshop instructors) and the workshop participants will critique. Sweet deal! This is one of the best ways to improve your photography — in any field of interest within photography. I am looking forward to the third session this Saturday.
Here are a few of my favorites from that live concert shoot. What do you think? Any critique or suggestions you can make? Let me know in the comments below, please!
Dazzle Jazz 171
Dazzle Jazz 232
Dazzle Jazz 190
Dazzle Jazz 578
Dazzle Jazz 374
Dazzle Jazz 294
Dazzle Jazz 128
Dazzle Jazz 125
Dazzle Jazz 124
Posted in Concert, Shoots and tagged big band, concert photography, Dazzle Jazz, KUVO by greggl with 1 comment.