Ivo Perez, the frontman of the surfer-punk band "Tyrannosaurus Sex"
Most people see the image above and believe that these effects are produced with Adobe Photoshop or a similar application. Effects like these are easy to get however by switching your camera's flash mode to rear curtain sync and using a speedlight or strobe. I also used wireless transmitters with my speedlight while shooting this concert but the effect can still be obtained with an on-camera flash as well. All of these images were shot over the weekend at a house show hosted in a log cabin in my hometown, Vernon, New Jersey. The above image was shot using an 0.8 second shutter speed so the light trails are pretty long but my wide f-stop of 4.2 still allows the flash to come through. For the image below I wanted to weaken the strength of the flash by closing my aperture to f/11 and decrease the length of the light trails by shortening by shutter speed to one fourth of a second. I raised my ISO to 400 to compensate for the light lost by changing my shutter speed and f-stop.
Hoag & The Weasel is an experimental folk rock duo that features a very talented violinist and a guitar player that also plays drums with his feet.
The result allowed for a more ambient lighting rather than a strong flash look to the photo. The next photo goes back to my camera's setting for the first photo in this post. Both of these photos have a 0.8 second shutter speed, 4.2 f-stop, ISO 100, and 62mm zoom.
The bassist of "Tyrannosaurus Sex"
This setting seemed to give good consistent results during the concert. For the sake of experimentation, I decided to switch to a two second shutter speed and see what kind of crazy results I could get. Notice how the lighting seems almost completely ambient and not from the flash because of the long shutter speed allowing the ambient light to overpower the flash.
James Carolan, the drummer of "Bobolink" a jam band that mixes funk, blues, and jazz.
Long Island-based folk punk act "Ankle Grease"
This last set of photos below all have a one second exposure. I especially love the rainbow face next to the guitarist's actual face in the first image in the group below. The three images after it all have more ambient light to them because I closed down my f-stop to 7.1
The frontman of "Bobolink"
Shawn Werman is the drummer of ska-punk band "Fat Chance"
The frontman of "Fat Chance" and one of my favorite songwriters