Reggae – monteverdiphoto.com

I was very pleased to be invited by Diaspora Reggae to shoot their live gig at Howl at the Moon at Universal Citywalk, on May 17. It was my first live gig shoot in a while, and I enjoyed getting back in the swing of it.

Howl at the Moon is a very nice club, with a really good, clean-sounding sound system. I thought they were only a dueling piano bar, but they have a lot of live bands, too. Because of the high-intensity color of the LED lighting system, I found it hard to get shots of the band where they didn’t look like Blue Man Group (or Red Man Group, etc.), so I wound up converting a lot of the shots to black and white, which really saved a lot of otherwise unusable shots.

The band consists of: Tyler Reinhart (Vocals, Keys), Cedar Compher (Lead Guitar, Keys, Melodica), Brandon (Drums), Joe Hall (Rhythm Guitar), Jason Dickie (Bass)

Diaspora is a great, L.A.-based reggae band that I met through Craigslist, and arranged a shoot while they were in the rehearsal studio. They are a great bunch of guys, and very talented. The band consists of: Tyler Reinhart (Vocals, Keys), Cedar Compher (Lead Guitar, Keys, Melodica), Brandon (Drums), Joe Hall (Rhythm Guitar), Jason Dickie (Bass)

During a break from rehearsing, we went outside and shot the typical, cliche “five guys against a brick wall” band shot. It’s hard to shoot something that is so common and make it different! You have to rely on the band giving you something to work with, in terms of attitude, look, and swagger… which the guys from Diaspora did very well at.

From the wall, we went out to the streets, literally, and we all stood in the middle of a busy street during a break in traffic. Don’t try this at home, kids!

Then we found a darker wall, with a low wall in front of it, and the band decided to try out their powers of levitation for a fun group shot.

Because the studio was dark, and I had traveled light, bringing just a couple of Speedlites, I was shooting at ISO1600, which brought a certain amount of digital noise to the images. Instead of correcting it in post, I worked with it, and allowed the processing to bring out the graininess and contrast of the RAW file.

This was a fun shoot, and I look forward to working with Diaspora again.