Killer Black + White Lightroom Edit - Photo of the Week

For this weeks photo of the week I chose an image I captured a little while ago of a band named Halestorm. The band member in the image is Josh the bass player. He was preparing to go on stage to kick off the show and was just hanging around just behind the stage. These are the type of photos I like to capture, the ones where its just me on stage in a place where other photographers are not. I say it all the time, if you can get out of the pit and away from the other photographers you will get something different.

It is funny how I ended up on stage and back stage for this concert. I originally did not have back stage access but ended up just climbing on stage before the show started. One of my friends was guitar teching the show came over said hey come on up il introduce you to the band. The more people you get to know at shows the easier it becomes to get access to places you want to go.

This photo is another prime reason why it is a bad practice to delete photos from the camera opposed to when you are sitting in front of the computer. There are so many times where I see the image on the 3 inch screen and go oh this isn’t anything special than see it on the computer and go BOOOM WOW thats awesome. The only time I will delete from the camera is if I missed my focus and its out by a lot.

As you can see in the video this image went from a hazy color to a killer black and white in a few lightroom tweaks. Anytime you have a hazy background or smoke or fog you can pump up your black levels which will sometimes kill the haziness. It certainly worked in this image, we went from a lot of smoke to killer tones by really bumping the black levels.

Take a look at the video to hear the full story of this image as well as how the photo was edited.

Nikon D3 Nikon 24-70 2.8
1/250th F/3.5 ISO 3200
RAW NOT CROPPED