Sungazer

Explanation

For this post, I'll be talking about this picture of Sungazer who played at The Mohawk on May 24th, 2023. This post is super late, I'm like 3 months behind and have a bunch of pictures/rolls to talk about so I just want to get into this.

Sungazer as a band is a bit more into the alternative electro jazz side of things. The band consists of the musician, and YouTuber, Adam Neely on bass along with the drummer Shawn Crowder. On this tour, they brought along Jared Yee on saxopohone and Shubh Saran on guitar.

For this show, Sungazer was acting as an opener for Plini along with Jakub Zytecki who played first.

I'll keep the music and show details brief because I want to get through a bunch of posts in the next couple of weeks and going too in detail is gonna really slow me down.

Honestly, I'm not sure if this is my favorite picture of Sungazer that I took. That said, I do like this picture a lot. It's one of the few pictures I took that have at least bits of all four performers, with Jared Yee offscreen and just the sax in frame. Mostly though I really like the combination of Shubh's and Shawn's expressions with the general vibe of the picture.

Ultimately, I do think that a couple other pictures I took were cleaner and more clear than this one. I'll point those out in the roll post later.

One thing that I do like about this composition is the interaction of Adam's bass and Shubh's guitar. It's a very specific moment where they're both in frame with both instruments in a line. It's a really directional composition from left to right. If I were to nitpick, maybe it would be better if the saxophone weren't in the frame. I know for a fact that this is one of those pictures that's a bit of a compromise due to my hesitation. I was waiting for a perfect picture and came out with something that while good, could have been better.

The general layout of the stage for this performance was Adam stage left followed by Jared, Shubh, and then Shawn to the right. As a result, there were only a few instances where I could take a picture with all four performers in the same frame. A bit before this Adam was actually a bit further right so it may have proved to be a bit better of a picture. That said, if I were further to the left I could more easily capture the full stage.

To that point, it's important to note where I was standing. I was up front and center a bit to the left of the stage. It proved to be a pretty nice spot overall and since I brought both a 28mm and a 50mm lens, again I'll talk more about that in the roll post, I had a bit of leeway in how I organized my pictures.

Before ending off I wanted to talk about the grain in this picture. It's really nice. As you can tell from the tags, this is another roll of Portra 400 pushed one stop. And it looks good. I don't mind the grain, it's really pleasing and doesn't distract much at all.

Anyways, that's it for this picture. I've got a lot more stuff I want to talk about so the next few might be a bit brief. Or they might be rambling so we'll find out as I get to them.