Andrew St. Clair

I shot Sleigh Bells at HARD fest last summer on Governors Island and they were terrific. However time can be deceiving as I forgot how much of a challenge they were to photograph. Their stage lighting consists of very bright strobey back lighting combined with a fog machine… and no (if very little) front lighting (a crew member joked that they are allergic to light). This is one of the few times I can’t complain about the lighting because as an audience member, it looks really fucking cool. While the “3 Song - No flash” rule was in effect at HARD fest, there was no such restriction at their show at Bowery Ballroom. So, I planned on using my speedlight to avoid every shot looking like a silhouette.

However, my plan was thwarted when my SB-600 decided to die. Again. My colleague Dave Andrako saw my flash neglect to fire before the show and made a crack like “When was the last time you recharged those batteries? *snicker* “  Well, the flash has been acting up for the last week or so. Won’t fire 29 out of 30 times. So, basically it’s in worthless mode right now. I was going to send it back to Nikon, but decided to work again right before I was ready to ship it out for repair.

Well, I still used a flash. The pop-up on my D300 (yeah, I know). Unfortunately, I ended up missing shots due to the slow recycle time… and generally because it was the pop-up flash. Combine that with my using a 17-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens (Currently have no rental lenses from my standby, BorrowLenses.com). The strobes were messing with the auto focus (at least when I was trying to shoot from the back of the audience for wide shots) and the kit lens isn’t the fastest lens on the block. I felt out of it. I got some good shots, but I felt terribly off my game.

Also, for a sold out show, the crowd seemed slightly anemic. So much so that Sleigh Bells’ Alexis Krauss didn’t do any crowd surfing like she did at Music Hall of Williamsburg days before. Bummer. She made her way into the fray twice, but only to stand and sing amongst the adoring fans.

CSS were much easier to shoot. No strobes and decent lighting. As with the Suzan a few weeks ago, I used a slow shutter for some of the shots to play with the light. Outside of the shooting bit, CSS are a fucking party band! I wouldn’t expect anything less from a band from Sao Paolo. They were super energetic and so much fun to watch and shoot.

As for the opener, Princeton, they were pretty chill compared to CSS, but I liked them. I mostly used my 50mm f/1.4. Princeton’s lighting was decent for an opener at Bowery Ballroom. I didn’t have much trouble getting the shots I wanted.

As a bonus, I shot some of the area around the Bowery and came up with this shot of a guy playing basketball. Anyway, as always, you can see all the coverage on BrooklynVegan.com (coming soon)(eventually(?)).