Great Big Sea were back in the area and I wasn’t going to miss a chance of seeing one of the greatest live bands play. Tarrytown is closer to where I live than New York City but it took just as long to get there thanks to the horrible traffic on the Thruway and TZ Bridge. I was worried I was going to miss the beginning of the show but luckily everything turned out fine and I got to shoot the show.

I already wrote a full review of the show at ReadJunk.com, so please visit that here. So I’ll just talk about the photography side of things…I was looking forward to shooting this show since last concert the lighting was awful and I knew Great Big Sea have some excellent lighting. Theaters like Tarrytown Music Hall have bright white lights which is fine by me. I don’t have to go that high up in ISO or hold the camera and shoot at 1/20.

I was told to not be in the way of the audience, and to shoot the first 3 songs. I wanted to shoot from my seat since I had 4th row and in the aisle, but security told me beforehand not to. I’m sure the audience disagrees, but the security & staff were nice. They were telling everyone to put their cameras away after awhile, which was pissing everyone off. There’s only so many crappy photos you can take with your trendy iPhone. Anyway, towards the end of the set I shot the show from my knees so I can get some front shots of the band. I was shooting from the sides mostly, but I was rushing a bit so those photos didn’t come out that well.

For this set, I used only my 70-200mm f2.8 and 18-70mm f3.5-4.5 lenses. The wide angle lens was nice because I didn’t have to dial down to ridiculous numbers to get a clear photo. The lighting was bright enough that I was shooting around 1250 ISO. That’s just unheard of with me.

My favorite photos of the evening are:

View the full gallery here.

Tags: 18-70mm f3.5-f4.5, 2009, 70-200mm f2.8, Alan Doyle, Bob Hallett, Canada, celtic rock, Concert Photography, Fortune's Favour, great big sea, Kris MacFarlane, Murray Foster, Newfoundland and Labrador, nikon d300, Rounder Records, sea shanties, Séan McCann, Tarrytown, Tarrytown Music Hall

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Concert Photography . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.