Last night Brandi Carlile played the San Diego House of Blues and I was lucky enough to be there, camera in hand. Well, I also had a photo pass, a couple of lenses and 2 x 16GB Hoodman CompactFlash cards. This was my first time shooting Brandi and my first time using the Hoodman cards in a real life concert environment.

First off, the Hoodman CompactFlash cards are fantastic. They lived up to the hype by being the fastest cards I have ever used and performed flawlessly. I managed to blow through a full 16GB and part of a second 16GB card and the buffer never seemed to be full even shooting high speed continuous RAW files all night long. I will continue to use the Hoodman cards and will post here my thoughts and opinions.  Now, on to the music…

As far a concert shoots go, this was a good one. The House of Blues actually had a photo pit, Brandi allowed us five songs instead of three, the lights were pretty good and the crowd was really into it. On the downside, the direct light caused a horrible microphone shadow on Brandi’s face and was a real challenge to work around.

With the full lighting and not many changes, the biggest challenge was to create some drama from what would be otherwise pretty flat images. I did some post processing in Lightroom to increase the contrast and did convert some images into Black and White. The full gallery is HERE