Frontman John Kevill throws me the horns after Warbringer's epic performance at Gramercy Theater, NYC. November 7, 2009. (photo by Chris Owyoung)

To say that Warbringer brings the pain is an understatement of epic proportion. The band’s performance is more accurately compared to the end result of a brick of C4 strapped to a bunny rabbit – bye bye bunny, bye bye.

That isn’t to imply that the guys in the band aren’t amazingly nice. As the lead shot is evidence of, charismatic frontman John Kevill is all about the fans. Warbringer’s set was incredibly fun to shoot.

Photographer’s Notes

Shooting with a single SB-900 on-camera, I had a lot of fun playing with the ratio of flash power to ambient light. As usual, my strategy was first to set a pleasing manual exposure for the ambient light and let the flash do the heavy lifting when it came to lighting the subject. I had my work cut out for me in frontman Jon Kevill whose on-stage energy seems boundless. Keeping up with him was hard enough without adjusting the exposure on the fly.

I ended up with a background exposure of 1/60 – 1/30 at ISO 2000 shooting at an f-stop of either f/3.5 or f/4.5. The flash was set mostly to TTL minus 1 EV in matrix metering mode. This worked well for the most part except when the ambient light went to black and the flash tended to overexpose slightly.

Shooting all six metal bands on the ticket with flash confirmed three things for me. 1) Shooting with flash is light shooting fish in a barrel. 2) You don’t need to shoot in bursts to get awesome stuff. 3) As long as you’re obeying rule #2, the performers don’t notice the flash at all.

Related posts:

1. The Ruse
2. Band Portrait: August Burns Red
3. The Gaslight Anthem