Weekly Artist Post - Gabe Lugo

A.J. Kinney.
Atothe Photography

This dude is my photography spirit animal. He takes the types of photos I want to take, with the type of equipment I like and want to use, in locations and of people I dream of having access to. He shoots a full-frame DSLR with a variety of prime and fisheye lenses.  From what I gather from his photos, he really likes shooting with a 50 prime lens and a fisheye, my guess would be a 15mm fisheye. This is what I use! His mastery of low light photography makes me envious, he gets great focus, little motion blur, and minimal noise in hectic low light situations. I'm jealous.

The first photo is a long exposure fisheye landscape of the Miami skyline. I'm not really distracted by the barrel distortion in the shot, as the real attention grabber in the photo is the amount of skyline that is squeezed into the frame. The light trail of the aircraft is a real attention grabber too, and since that kind of curves in the opposite direction of the distortion, it kind of counteracts it. Great shot!

The second photo is also a fisheye shot, and in this one the use of symmetry somewhat highlights the barrel distortion in a very interesting way. I don't mind the fisheye effect, in fact this is much the type of photo I want to take when exploring old structures and urban spaces. You can just squeeze so much of the scene into the frame in a single shot, and as long as you maintain good symmetry in your shot I think the barrel distortion of the fisheye is actually a great effect.

The final photo is taken at Echostage in Washington DC. The artist is Diplo, a favorite of mine. I've taken photos like this before and its very hard because of the minimal light and the short amount of time the artist will be on stage like this interacting with the crowd, you really have to get it right in a hurry. Homeboy definitely used a flash.  There's no way he captured this kind of shot otherwise. If you look at the way Diplo is lit up, that kind of light definitely came from the camera as its too bright to have come from the colored stage lighting.  If I had to guess, this shot came out underexposed because he took it in a hurry without the proper settings, so he had to crank up the exposure in post processing then make it black and white to hide some of the noise and loss of detail. Still a good shot, I don't mind it!