I'm going to be really honest right now. Shooting this event was really hard for me. I had some bad news the night before and I felt really unfocused. The day was kind of a blur--I was working mostly on auto-pilot and thankful to just get through it. When I shoot events, especially live music, I go into a trance that can be really helpful when there's a lot that I don't want to think about. However, it was hard for me to know if I was taking good images. While I was feeling alright about it (and thanking whatever force was allowing me to stay in focus / exposure consistently), coming home I felt a little discouraged. I have been working with Doomtree for almost 8 years and while that presents its own set of challenges (namely, how to take a new shot of a group that i'm so familiar with...), I really love these people and I wanted to blow this one out of the park (pun inten...yeah, you get it).
I sent in my photos. Didn't feel great.
But then I decided to sit down and take another look. I often don't play outside of my regular editing box and I thought I'd try out a couple tweaks. Crop super tight here, add a little grain, get a rich contrast here, blow out there...That changed a lot for me. I really realized the potential of the post-process. It's also important to give your photos a chance to settle-- there were ones I had completely skipped over but when I came back to them, saw some potential I hadn't seen before.
So, I'm feeling pretty proud of this collection at this point and I hope you do too.
