My friends in F1rst Class Citizen played The Boardwalk a few weeks back, and opened for Taproot.  This is my second time seeing FCC, and they did not disappoint, of course.  Lydia used to be in a pretty awesome local band called Aroarah, whom I only had the fortune of seeing once before she left the band.  Xander was in a band up in the Redding area called Common Ground, who I used to dig.  I’ve still got an ep/demo or something of theirs in a box somewhere.  Definitely very cool people, and excellent musicians all around.

This shot is one of my favorites from the night.  There’s a common trend between all these Boardwalk photos, unfortunately, and it’s that they’re a bit soft in the focus of the photos.  The lighting at the Boardwalk is pretty atrocious unless you’re blasting flash, and I just don’t like to roll like that.  I have a cheap third-party TTL flash that I use on a TTL sync cord in my left hand, shooting with my right.  Sometimes that flash gets it right, sometimes it doesn’t, sadly.  Half the time, the camera doesn’t even act like there’s a flash attached, so it sets up shutter speeds in the 30-80th/sec range.  Add to that single-hand-holding with moving subjects and you get a majority of shots being soft.  I still end up posting the ones I like despite the lack of sharpness.  If it conveys the emotion of the performers and is still mostly legible, it works for me in these situations.

Anyways, the reason why I really liked this shot is because of the camera being held up.  It looks like it’s a Rebel T3i or similar with one of those Gary Fong Puffer Pop-Up Diffusers on it.  Well, F1rst Class Citizen’s thing is their references to their fans as “paparazzi”.  They actually have tabloids on their website, as cool little fun promo materials.  As soon as I saw this person throw their camera up in the air as I was actually leaving, being done shooting their set, I knew I had to take this shot even though it was a quick, rough, poorly lit situation.

But after a bit of rescue and TLC in post production, I think it’s a viable image, and works with their paparazzi theme use.