Shonen Knife plays Japanese pop punk at its best.  They sound like the love child of Joey Ramone and Pikachu.  They have been touring in the states for close to thirty years first getting a wide audience when they opened for Nirvana on their Nevermind tour.

The show that I photographed was at the Fun Fun Fun Fest in downtown Austin.  The publication I was working with set up an interview with them before their set and I tagged along at the interview to get a few shots of them when they weren’t playing.  After finishing with us in the media tent they got swamped by a bunch of other media people hoping for pictures or an interview.  In the sea of indie and punk bands playing the festival they really stood out with their brightly colored outfits and demure attitude.  I have found that if you want to get a lot of press attention at a festival the best method is to look completely different from all of the other bands.

When it was time for their set I headed to the main stage and got into the photo pit.  They had a strict first three songs only policy so I knew that it would be important to get the pics quickly.  I ended up sharing the pit with around fifteen other photogs but everyone was polite and for those first three songs worked well trying to avoid getting in each other’s shots while getting good shots of our own.

For the shoot I had elected to use my kit lens.  It was a sunny day so I didn’t think I would have a need for a large aperture but my kit lens goes wider than my other lenses and I though that could come in handy.  That turned out to be a bit of a mistake.  When the band started they didn’t clear the sides of the stage.  There were lots of random people standing at the sides of the stage within a few feet of the band members.  This comes off as very distracting in the final images.  If I had used a wide aperture lens I would have had a better chance of getting a good bokeh effect that would have blurred those people at least a bit.  As it was, when I post processed the images in lightroom I did my best to make them less distracting by dropping their contrast, saturation and exposure while improving all of those elements on the performers.  It wasn’t a perfect solution but it did help.

The band did give a great show and after the first three songs we were allowed to shoot from the crowd so I was able to get a few decent distance shots using my zoom lens.