Flicks of Respectable Street
Palm Beach County photographer, Dan Alavi, walks us through some technicalities and some idiosyncrasies of a couple of his favorite photos captured in West Palm Beach at Respectable Street. This Subculture Group establishment is a notorious bar and music venue that attracts quite a few unique characters, as you’ll see. One of these frequent flyers is Dan, as he can often be seen — behind the lens — snapping away under the stage lights.
Armed with a flash and a finger on the shutter, almost nothing escapes his focus. Take it away, Dan.
DAIKAIJU
These two photos are from Daikaiju’s recent show at Respectable Street. They are phenomenal to see live! They set up their kit on the floor instead of on the stage and the crowd just packs in right up next to them, forming this little pit. Communicating with just gestures and musical notes they command the crowd. Quite a sight to behold. During the show, usually toward the end, they set the cymbals of the drums on fire and from that fire they light a guitar ablaze. We won’t speak on the legality of this… Anyway, the first shot of the bassist on the left throwing up a peace sign and the lead guitarist on the right was shot with the Fujian 35mm lens. The f/1.7 aperture is decent enough for low light, but the manual focus makes it difficult to nail that perfectly accurate focus. The second photo of the fire is one of the ones I really love how it turned out. For this, I used my fisheye lens, but instead of using flash like I normally do, I opened up the aperture to f/2, the widest it goes, turned my ISO to 6400, and focused as best as I could. I love how there’s so much going on in this photo, the expressions on people’s faces, the fire, the crowd, so many little scenes in one grand moment.
I think these photos are a good example of something I think a lot of people learning photography forget or fail to learn; depending on the type of photography you’re doing, your photo doesn’t always need to be perfectly sharp and perfectly in focus. The most important thing to me in the moment I took these photos was capturing the moment. You only have a split second to get the photo. Why fiddle around with getting the focus perfect? Get it as good as you can and snap that photo. Once the moment ends, it’s gone for good.
WOODY
I took this photo this past Halloween at the venerable, the ever present, the hallowed Respectable Street! My typical setup for when I’m in a crowded place like Respects is the TTArtisan 7.5mm f/2 fisheye, a Godox TT350F, and a Godox X3F wireless flash trigger for off-camera flash. I set my flash to TTL mode, usually with about
a -1/3 underexposure set so the flash isn’t too strong. I keep my aperture between f/8 or f/11, f/11 being the tightest the aperture can close down to. At these tighter apertures and the depth of field, or what is in focus, can cover around 1 foot to infinity… so basically everything is in focus. The higher the ISO when using TTL flash metering the lower the strength of the flash can be, which helps use less battery and also decreases the cycle time before your flash has to charge up to be ready again for use. With this setup I just keep scanning the surroundings for something interesting and when I see it I sneak up, hold up my camera and flash, and take the photo. Zone focusing, what I described with the tight aperture and crazy depth of field, can be faster than autofocus, especially on this ultra-wide lens, which due to the crop factor of aps-c sensors
is an equivalent of an 11mm focal length on a full-frame camera. It really is a perfect setup for run-and-gun photos in super tight spots like clubs and parties. The most important part that makes this setup work is the flash. You don’t need to use off-camera flash like me, but you need the flash to be able to use a tight aperture like f/8 so everything is always in focus, especially for low light scenarios. There’s this one saying I heard that always comes to mind when shooting with this gear, “f/8 and be there.”
