Photographing Coheed & Cambria at ArcTanGent 2019

For the second year running I had the privilege of attending ArcTanGent festival. Looking at the stacked line-up, I knew this year would be a good one at that. Headlining the Arc stage (main stage for those who don’t know) on the first night were the mighty Coheed and Cambria.

Claudio Sanchez opening the show

As a long time fan of the band I was extremely excited to be able to photograph them as the band are on my bucket list of bands to photograph. The set had some insane lighting which I was able to utilise to the best of my abilities to get some pretty unique imagery. The stage lighting created some gorgeous silhouettes and shadows in the 3 images below.

For the images above I decided to edit them in such a way to highlight the intense silhouettes the stage lighting created. I used a mixture of self made presets on Lightroom to create a moodier look to the images but still keeping the colours bright in the coloured images, keeping the highlights bright in the black and white image.

As you can see in the photo above Claudio Sanchez was giving it his all during the performance. It’s one of the best things about being a live music photographer when you’re able to photograph a musician who’s passion comes through your lens, emotion like this just makes for better images and helps to tell more of a story.

For all the images on this post I used my Canon 5D Mark iii with either my 24-70mm 2.8 lens or my 70-200mm 2.8 lens. The low aperture enabled me to capture the colours well as it let in all the available light during the show. During post I kept the vibrancy bumped up to really saturate the colours in the images above as I didn’t want to lose any of them during editing. I always aim for my photos to look as true to the actual show as possible.

My favourite photo of the bands set

I wanted to get an image to highlight Claudios hair and show movement during their set. The photo above does both of these things. The highlights draw attention to his hair and the high shutter speed has captured the movement and kept the image sharp. The photo above is easily my favourite of their entire set as I love the attention to detail within it. The photo is minimal in its appearance but still keeps a high level of sharpness and detail when you really look into it. This images makes me super proud.