I kind of missed the boat with the whole Throwback Thursday (or TBT, as it’s known in the world of social media) yesterday. I decided to do a little Flashback Friday today instead. Would that be FBF? Anyway, we all start somewhere and I always enjoy seeing where some of the photographers I admire started out. I’ve been watching the 30 Days of Wedding Photography workshops with Susan Stripling on CreativeLIVE. If you’re a wedding photographer and you’re not familiar with Susan’s work, I would highly recommend checking her out. Her detail shots are PHENOMENAL! Early on in the 30 days, she was showing some of her wedding photos from when she first started about 10 or so years ago compared to how she shoots certain aspects of the day now. It really was truly inspiring. I’ve been a fan of her work for some time now, but to see how far she’s come really gave me a lot of encouragement to look at where I was when I started and where I am now.
All of that being said, I bring you today’s Flashback Friday shot. The one on the left was taken on May 2010 of a local band called 8 Amp Fuse. The singer was my neighbor and the guitar players were both parents of a couple of my friends. I shot it on a Nikon D80 and I think I had just gotten a speed light, which I had little to no experience with. I believe I did use it on a few shots that night, but not many as I could seem to get the kinds of shots I wanted with it and I was trying not to be too distracting. Trying to make due with what I had and no flash, I pumped up my ISO (I honestly couldn’t tell you to what at this point, but that camera got noisy around 800), lowered my shutter speed and probably opened up my aperture as much as I could. Look at all of that noise! I don’t remember for sure, but I probably had my 24-70 2.8 on my camera for this shot. The room was pretty dark and they didn’t have much for lighting on the stage.
The shot on the right, you’ve probably seen a few times now if you’ve been following my work. I took that shot behind the scenes during the music video shoot with Dark White Media for Ashley Jordan’s “Smoke On This Gun” a few weeks ago. While the lighting situation was quite a bit different for this one, I took the shot with specific intentions behind why I chose the settings I did. I shot this on a Nikon D4 at f/5 for 1/250 of a second at ISO 3200. I knew I needed to have a fast enough shutter speed to stop any motion blur, as Alex was rocking’ out to the song, so I also needed to compensate by bringing up my ISO. I wanted a slightly higher aperture because he was moving a bit and I didn’t want to chance him moving out of focus. I had my 50 1.8 on my camera. Since I was mainly there to assist Anthony with anything that my come up for the video, I didn’t want to throw on my 70-200 since I knew I was going to be picking up and putting down my camera a lot. Besides, if you’ve ever held the D4 (D3, D3s, D2, etc.), you know that the camera body alone gets pretty heavy before throwing a big lens on there. I really didn’t do much editing to this photo other than sharpen it a bit and convert it to B&W. By the way, I used actions by Nicole over at Nicole Lopez Photography for the B&W conversion. They are AWESOME and I can’t recommend them enough.
So there you have it, my Flashback Friday. It’s easy to think that you’re not moving forward in your work. Sometimes I feel like I’m not making any progress and then I go back and look through some of my older work and I can see my progress. I hope you’ve been inspired to go take a look at some of your own work and see how you’ve grown since you started. I’d love to hear from you!
Sarah Thornington - Love FBF, brilliant. The new image is fab, so very cool!