Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival

Casey Donovan performing at the 2012 Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival at Federation Square.

© James Troi

This past weekend saw Federation Square host the Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival, a collection of Indigenous culture on display including moving picture, sculpture, painting, photography and music. When I saw the line up included former Australian Idol Casey Donovan I decided to take my camera along and make some photos.

Casey is a great performer, she puts so much of herself into her art it's just beautiful to watch the joy she has as she shares her music with a crowd.

Following Casey was Dan Sultan, a crowd favourite for sure. Having positioned myself just right of stage centre (so the microphone wouldn't always be in the middle of the signer's face) I was quickly engulfed in a mass of people when Dan arrived on the stage. He's just as energetic as Casey and had the crowd singing along loudly to his tunes.

The shoot details

Knowing I was going to be in a crowd I chose to forego the use of a tripod for which, within the confines of Melbourne City you're supposed to have a permit anyway, and went handheld. Knowing from experience that stage lighting isn't there for a photographer's benefit, and would be pretty poor, I pushed my ISO to 1600. Of course ISO 1600, even on a 5D MkII means a "noisy" photo, but that's not something I tend to worry about, especially for live music shots.

There's a few things about noise;

1. It gives the photo a bit of a grunge factor, when viewed closely,
2. Most of our images are resized for use and in resizing the noise becomes less obvious (depending on how you resize the shot),
3. Lightroom and other photo applications are extremely good at removing the noise, if that's the look you'd prefer.

Being jostled in a crowd makes for a difficult shooting environment, especially when the folks in front of you are jumping about and you're trying to stop your 70-200mm lens from being hit by flailing arms. But I think I managed to make some decent shots.

The post processing

I use Lightroom 3 for all my shots. And these days very few images see the inside of Photoshop. Lightroom 3's ability for spot removal and minor non-destructive adjustments makes it easy to use. And with a set of Presets like Lab-In-A-Box most of my post processing work is just a few short clicks.

I also shared a couple of photos on Twitter and mentioned @caseydonovan, she replied saying she likes the photos on my Flickr photostream, so I'm happy now. ;)

Click on any image above to see a larger view.