Le Meridien Tampa Event // Nouvelle Vague

I grew up on the the melancholia music of college-alternative 80’s bands like Echo and the Bunneymen, The Cure, and The Smiths. So, when I was asked to photograph Nouvelle Vague’s performance at Le Méridien Tampa for their “The New Wave ” tour, I was super-excited.

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Nouvelle Vague is a French cover band that plays 80’s punk, post-punk and new wave songs in 60’s Bossa nova-style arrangements. The result is something great; an original, seductive sound that is all at once groovy and beautifully nostalgic.

Tampa’s century-old Federal Courthouse is the renovated location of Le Méridien; downtown’s new euro-contemporary style hotel with 13o stylish rooms, French bistro and craft cocktail bar.

There were lots of cool details to shoot at Le Méridien, from the the architecture and street scenes surrounding to the interior decor. Natural lighting worked well for most everything, but photographing parts of the performance later in the evening became tricky because of low light and the very strong uplighting that cycled from red to blue to green every minute. To handle this, I shot a combination of natural lighting and bounced flash; natural light to show the mood and colors of some frames and bounced flash to power through the harsh uplighting when needed on others. Again, my Nikon Df did an excellent job at high ISO’s. The step-and-repeat shots were all done with bounced flash. I had a very tight space to shoot with there, but fortunately there was a white wall to my back that worked well for bouncing the Nikon SB-910 Speedlight flash. All of the step-and-repeat shots were done with a Nikon 35mm f/1.4G lens.

The performance was fantastic. Nouvelle Vague’s live sound was outstanding and they put on a great show. Here are some photos from the day…