Nouvelle Vague tuning up on stage

Professional photography is tough these days, there is no denying that and none more so than in the world of live music. Hundreds of photographers are hungry for images of the current artistes and it becomes something of a lottery in making those much needed sales. This shot was taken with the intention of offering something a little different, not so much for the fact he was smoking on stage, in fact it was at an outdoor event, so I believe that is ok?!! I just loved the fact that the band were doing their own preparation, chatting away in French, setting the levels, tuning up and so on. Some of my peers were getting a little fidgety, quite common, as a lot of waiting around takes place at these events which can be boring – I spent a little time capturing what was going on around me. The light as you can tell was very low, so I cranked up my ISO to 800, kept the aperture wide open and shutter speed around 80th of a second. In these scenarios, noise (or grain in old film parlance is unavoidable) and quality tricky to maintain.