Guitar hero

During the spring, I photographed a few parties which were organized by a friend - Peter. These were the same parties which this shot of Vlado was taken. Anyhow, this guy was in a band which played a concert - and as far as I can remember, he was playing a guitar ;)

People who worship beer

Guitar blues

Vlado, performing in front of a nice crowd at Ljubljana's K4 club. The only thing I did with this shot is resize it - other than that, it's straight out of the camera. I realize we've slowed down with posting here, I spent a week in France (climbing, a photo or two will come soon), and Žiga has so much on his plate I don't know how he can handle it.

Party hard!

Another photo from my party series (here's the previous one). These are loads of fun - here, I just held the camera over my head and snapped this crazy moment. Plus, these party photos need no post-production at all. With most normal photos, I usually have to adjust the white balance a bit (since I don't feel like doing it in-camera). This basically means that I make the colors look normal (instead of too warm or too cold). But with party photos, the colors are crazy anyways from all of the colored lights, so it doesn't matter. 

A party of colors

A friend of ours organizes a series of parties once a month in Ljubljana, and he recently asked me to photograph them. Photographing parties can be a lot of fun, though I need some time to get in the mood - both to remember the settings I prefer to use (these depend on what I'm trying to achieve) and to get into the groove and to feel the party itself. The best photos are usually taken after an hour or two, when people relax and let loose. When this happens, the photographer usually goes unnoticed, this leads to better photos. 

There are a few annoyances to photographing parties. One is the fact that you have to be careful with your gear - with so many people around, there's always a chance someone spills something onto your camera, lens and flash (or crashes into you). Another thing which can be annoying is people who ask to have their picture taken... then demand to see the results... and ask for you to take more pictures because they happen not to like the first one.

Confusion

Let's start of by explaining that this photo is not photoshopped or digitally not manipulated in any way. Yes, go back and read that one more time. No, I couldn't tell you exactly how it came to be, though I do understand it a bit. I was photographing a party (the same party this photo was taken) with my flash and I used a very long exposure (one or two seconds). In between, other strong lights came into the photo - either other people's flashes or the lighting from the club, I don't know. But this is what makes this photo look like a mash-up of different pictures - for every flash, the camera was in a different position and recorded something different. In the space of that second, it recorded everything you see above. Had I been using film, the photo would still have been very very similar. Žiga and I sometimes use these tricks on purpose - such as in this photo of me.

In the club

Somedays, the camera just doesn't obey you - no matter what you do, the pictures just don't work. Other days, you don't seem to be able to take bad photos. You know the exact settings, you feel the composition, things just click. And somehow, photos like the one above come straight out of the camera. I'm not joking - there's absolutely no photoshop here at all, I only used The Gimp to resize this so I could post it here. How, you ask? I used an external flash to take the picture, but left the exposure for around one second. This way, the camera collects surrounding light - such as the green light above.

This was taken just a couple of hours ago in KMŠ, where I was photographing a party for the student association known as MEOS.

Wild blonde dancing with the cutting light

To make this blog a little more bloggish, I mean, to also show a little where are we spending our time, I am posting photo that I have taken the past weekend. We had a little party time with some friends at Cvetličarna club in Ljubljana. I was planning to take some more photos of our friends having party time and dancing, but later the alcohol and interest for other stuff was stronger, so I took only a few, nothing really special. For me the most interesting is this one showing two people I don't really know well, but I love her hair dancing wildly with the light that he can't handle :) She is a professional dancer, at least she was a few years ago, as I remember, so she is hard to handle. But I think he had a great time anyway :)

In the groove

Another party photo, taken a day or two after the first one. This time the backround has been coloured in photoshop to make her stand out - I think it works great. Looking at this, you can feel the groove in the club and imagine that single moment in time.

Party to the limit

This picture was taken at a party next to the river Kolpa, near the Croatian border. My flash was pointed to the wall (so the light from it bouced off the wall) and I took it at a wide angle with my old 18-55 kit lens. The only change I made to this picture was turning it to black & white with some yellow tint added.
And now a short story about this party animal: about an our after this picture was taken, the party animal went to sleep on the roof of his car. The next day the car's roof was shaped a little different :-)

Just chilling

I sometimes photograph parties and similar events - in this case for a student organization. I noticed this girl standing there, just relaxing, and I knew exactly what I wanted. I switched to my cheap Canon EF 50 mm F1,8 lens (this is probably the cheapest new lens money can buy, but it's got great optics and it's really light), but I knew that focusing was going to be a problem. I didn't want to use the focusing assist light of my borrowed Sigma flash because I was afraid she might notice that I was trying to photograph her. Instead, I waited with my finger on the camera trigger for one of the reflectors to throw enough light her way so I could get focus. Once this happened, I switched to manual focus (so the focus stayed where it was) and waited once again, this time waiting for colored light - once it came, I pressed the trigger and let of 3 or 4 shots, of which only one was usable.

The 50 mm lens is by far one of my favorites. When I bought my first one, it replaced the kit zoom on the camera I was using at the time (an EOS 400D, also known as a Digital Rebel XTi) for three months. The first time it was taken off was when the camera fell on the floor - the lens was destroyed, and I had to replace the bayonet mount on the body. I got another 50 mm not long after from some friends as a birthday present. I love prime lenses (non-zoom), my next will probably be Canon's 85 mm F1,8.