Pure Cirkus 4th anniversary show
December 1st, 2009
This was certainly one of the more interesting events I’ve shot recently – and technically very challenging. Pure Cirkus is a very alternative circus, full of fire-eating, razor-blade swallowing, nail-bed-laying, feats of impressive athleticism and pain tolerance, all set to a hardcore industrial soundtrack. Like I said…very interesting stuff. A couple of their performers were at another event I shot about a month ago and were amazing, so I wanted to go back and shoot the entire group.
The technical challenge? This show was in a really badly lit nightclub – even when the spotlights onstage were fully up (which they weren’t for most of the show), I was getting 1 sec exposure at f5.6 ISO 400…so what do you do with that? I didn’t want to shoot with flash because it would have just wrecked the ambiance of the show, so I decided to shoot wide open at f2.8, crank up the ISO to 3200, and shoot on a monopod. Oh, did I also mention that my shooting position was right in front of the subwoofers? Crazy vibrations from the music right into the camera.
A couple of post-processing notes…The D700 is amazing in low light but there is pronounced noise at ISO 3200. I used Nik Software’s Dfine and Sharpener Pro for noise reduction and sharpening, both of which I highly recommend – both have good automatic settings and batch processing tools (both of which I used on these shots) as well as really good controls for fine tuning what and where the image is processed.
It was a cool show…not for the faint of heart however. One pic posted below; the rest are here, with the caution that some of these shots are not for the easily offended or squeamish.
