Leica "More" Worship Night Concert

[jloden]

I do quite a bit of volunteering with our church photo team (Liquid Church in NJ), and last night I shot some photos for our "More" worship night series. Once a month our music team puts together a mid-week evening service with a worship music set and a short message.

This is a challenging venue to work in; it's a large room with black ceilings lit only by colored stage lights and spotlights. From past experience I know I'll be at ISO 1600-12,800 depending on f-stop and shutter speeds, and I have shot these events in the past with my Nikon gear. This time around I decided to step out of my comfort zone a bit and shot the entire thing mirrorless, with a combination of my GH3 and Fuji X-T1. I also shot mostly with the 35mm Summilux mounted so I was working manual focus for the first time at an event like this.

I thought I'd share some of the shots from the X-T1 + 35mm 'lux combo here.

Note: These are processed JPGs since LightRoom still doesn't support RAW for the X-T1. A few places I had to live with crazy WB combinations or highlight and shadow clipping that'll likely be recoverable if I reprocess these as RAWs later.

 

[carlb]

Superb images, Jay! Especially like the last one with votives and silhouette.

What's nice about such an event is your access to performers and audience. Being a religious event though, I'm sure there's a bit of decorum called for, but probably mitigated by the event being intended as performance.

 

[jloden]

Thanks Carl

Our church is quite contemporary (as you can probably guess... ) and hence also very media-savvy. As a result they tend to give pretty much free rein for photos and video since we make extensive use of it in social media campaigns, our online church services, etc. Certainly I can't imagine getting access like that to a typical concert!