Parachute
Zurich, 1 March 2010
Third gig in four nights for me, and this one was a sellout. Walking around the back of the venue with another photographer, we happened to meet the local promoter Corinne, who kindly allowed us to step in and take a few shots of the support act Parachute. The lights were good, and I managed to grab a few nice shots with the 24-70mm.
However, for Kelly Clarkson we were pre-warned that we’d be shooting from the mixing desk. A quick chat between Corinne plus the four photogs and it was decided we’d rather shoot from the balcony, so up we went.
Lighting again was ‘ok’, but at that distance the 70-200mm on 5DII full-frame simply does not have the ‘reach’ needed. I debated switching to my old 20D to make use of the 1.6x crop (giving me 320mm at the long end) but in the end kept the 5DII since I figured I could crop the 21MP RAW files if needed… So everything for Ms Clarkson was with 5DII, ISO1600 and the 70-200mm at f/2.8 the whole time keeping shutter speeds above 1/200 to avoid shake.
Therefore another mainstream act proves my theory of “the bigger the band, the further away you will be”. Shame in this case, as the lights were good and I am sure we’d have had some great shots from the pit, just look at the Parachute images on my flickr page.
