Nightclub Photography

Between a two day long lingerie shoot and filming the last day of Vancouver's Top Gay Model, I've been quite busy with work.  And wasting time with some street photography, most money I made from that these days was finding a $5 bill on the ground.  But I'll finally do an update about some more nightclub gear and techniques.


Go here to see the photos from the VFW after party from Aubar, Republic and Fortune.




I'll talk about the gear I used for the photos I took in the Vancouver Fashion Week After Parties.

Camera Body: Canon 7D

Why didn't I use a 5d2?  Because of this lens:

Tokina 11-16mm 2.8

This bad boy (I didn't call it that, street photographer Emma did in the video overview of some of my gear.) is awesome for indoor party shots.  This makes the 16-35L on a 5d cry like a spanked child, at 1/4 of the price (canon hate.  no hard stop on the focus ring, why...).  But there is a new tokina 16-28mm 2.8 for the full frame sensor now, I'll have to check that out.  Sometime.

***
The top picture was shot at f/4, 0.6s, iso-400 at 16mm.

Explaination:
f/4: will darken the overall scene and allow wider depth of field.  Autofocus is bunk is nightclubs since it's near pitch black with random strobe lights, so focus will have to be manual.

0.6s: extremely slow shutter speed will brighten up the scene and cause the scene to blur.  BUT the short range of the flash will cause everything hit by the flash to freeze in motion.  I.e. sharp up close and background blurred.

iso-400: again to brigthen up the scene and bring out the shadows.  The point is to make the background look brighter to make the crazy nightclub strobe colors come out.

16mm: the long end of the lens, it's still wide enough and has less distortion.  Having a wide angle lens allows for infinity focus at a shorter distance, allowing manual focus to become trivially easy.

For flash, I used a canon 580EXII.  And a battery grip just to make the camera look bigger.  If you've seen me around, I usually have a L-bracket mounted on the camera.  Only time I take it off is if I'm going to a club.  Bigger camera looks more impressive.  (seriously).

Go here to see the photos from the VFW after party.

come back later to see how I do the crazy light trails and multiple-exposure effects.