Event Photography: Cambridge Jazz Festival 2025, Robin Phillips @ Gonville Hotel

Faruk Kara
Feb 14
2 min read

After delivering some acceptable results for my first outing for the Cambridge Jazz Festival, I was invited to shoot Robin Phillips on the Thursday evening. Robin Phillips is a singer, songwriter and bandleader. This evening he was leading a five piece band. Photographing them at the Gonville Hotel was a very different event photography challenge. To start with the band were installed at one end of a large dining room; the light was uniformly flat with two banks of coloured LED lighting on each side of the stage; the lights were low; and the stage area was a mess of wiring, mic stands, music stands and equipment.

Once again, I took the Canon 24-105mm f4, and Sigma 50mm f1.4. Apart from the band shot taken in the resting room - flat light - all the other shots were taken in monochrome. My Canon has the option to shoot in black/white. The file is still in RAW and can be converted to colour without any loss, but shooting in this mode allows you to see the results in monochrome when reviewing on the back of the camera making it easier to understand the exposure and highlights. If you're not convinced, try it.

Apart from the band photo in the rest room, all the photos were deliberately shot and processed as monochrome. Why? Well, I think jazz presents very well in b/w, however, the main reason in this case was that it is easier to hide the stage clutter, and it also made the best of the flat LED lighting. The other big challenge was to capture the band as a whole as shooting from either wing of the stage meant pointing the camera at the LED banks on the opposite side, and taking a shot from the front meant standing in front of the diners while working around the pillars. Instead I chose to shoot the whole band from the back of the dining room over the audience. That also had the added benefit of capturing the ambience of the setting.

With the low lighting, I used a combination of the Canon 24-105mm f4 and Sigma 50mm f1.4 fully open so unable to manage a great depth of focus. This meant concentrating on the shots on individuals, or groups with one individual in focus, or trying to get two musicians in the same focal plane. To increase the depth of focus, get closer to the subject and shoot wider, in this case 24mm.