Hub City Stompers with Echo Creek

Hub City Stompers wide shot

Recently at a networking mixer held by Wilkes-Barre POWER, I ran into an old friend from when I first moved to PA, Rob Alapick. Rob does a lot of show promotion for Ska, Punk, and other bands and we got to talking about collaborating for a show this fall. Turns out, he had an upcoming show locally as one of his bands, the Hub City Stompers, had a venue back out last minute. Rather than make the drive from Ohio to New Jersey in one shot, they wanted a place to play and crash to break to the trip. As I’ve said before, I got my start in photography and have always loved shooting bands.

One thing I’ll give the Wilkes-Barre music scene is that it’s a vibrant one. Most weekends, you’ll find 5-6 shows playing at various venues. The one downfall is that many of these venues are small converted spaces. Bars, pubs, and corner spots that having live music was an afterthought. That, or places designed for live music, but not for the recording of it. What I’m saying is lighting often sucks. Shooting at a concert with a big stage show has the luxury of bright lights and makes shooting a bit easier. Smaller, more intimate venues, while great for a crowd, often are a pain to shoot in.

Raw unedited photo

The lights were set to a purplish red and didn’t change throughout the evening, making it hard to shoot.  as you have to either have to decide to shoot to counter the lighting or capture it with the lighting as is and deal with it in post-production. If some white lights had been included, you could work around it easier, but in this case, they weren’t. So the option was to make them black and white and adjust for contrast.  You can see the end result below and the links will take you to full res galleries.

Hub City Stompers – Full High Res Gallery

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Echo Creek – Full High Res Gallery

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