March 2014, Malasimbo Festival. 

My late grandfather taught me how to understand and read light. YouTube and Photojojo were one of the few online platforms back then that let me really check if photography was something I was really interested in. St. Benilde became the space in which I could explore if my ability to photograph could match the talents of others. Concerts and gigs, however, was my first teacher in being decisive to make light work for me.

The one big difference between shooting events and doing studio work is your control of light as the photographer. When you’re in a concert, you have no control of the number of lights present nor their direction. Through jumping gigs and shooting concerts, the variety of spaces and lighting designs taught me to read patterns, and to learn not to be trigger happy but be anticipative of when the lighting I want to achieve is about to happen.

The original file of this was a black and white jpeg. Back then, I didn’t have access to a lot of memory, so I shot in jpeg and committed to settings I chose on the fly. I remember not enjoying the background—the audience being flooded with colored lights while wearing an uncontrollable selection of colors. They served as a distraction and it gave me a tough time focusing on my subject. Switching to black and white helped me like a horse with visors.

There was a general haze in the open space, which made me understand that conical lights would create obvious lines and sharp differences between black and white; in other words, spotlights would look killer. All I had to do was read the pattern of the other lights, so that I would create the illusion in the photograph that there was only one light in the whole space.

The concert world added blueprints to my studio work, by learning how to bring what I loved about those scenes into a controllable environment.