CameraPro On The Couch with Ruby Boland

June 28, 2022

Ruby Boland is a professional music photographer who has built a career capturing energetic and vibrant images of Australia’s rich music and festival culture. We caught up with Ruby as part of our On The Couch series to chat about the challenging and rewarding world of music photography.

As a concert lover and musician herself, music has always played a defining role in Ruby’s life. Her parents were big music lovers, and she recalls being exposed to it a lot while growing up. Unlike music, there were no camera enthusiasts in her life that inspired a love of photography; she just remembers always having a camera with her and wanting to take photos of anything and everything.

The fusion of music and photography came when Ruby was 12 and went to her first festival. She took her camera along to capture the memory of seeing her favorite bands with her friends, and an affinity for music photography was born. Through her teens, Ruby continued taking her camera to gigs and developing her photographic skills. She gradually built a portfolio of concert and festival shots that she used to get her foot in the door shooting music content for print publications.

Photo by Ruby Boland

These days, Ruby works with bands, venues, and festivals to photograph a diverse range of live music shows. Her advice for budding music photographers looking for a start is to go to as many shows and shoot as much as possible. With print media playing a less significant role these days, Ruby suggests reaching out to venues and festivals you’d like to shoot for, sharing your portfolio, and offering your services.

Ruby is a regular at small gigs and multi-day festivals and loves photographing both. She finds the smaller shows more intimate and enjoys capturing the interactions between the artist and the audience. Conversely, she feels that stadium shows and festivals generate a different vibe and loves nailing the massive hero shot that conveys the charged atmosphere of a giant crowd.

Anyone who has spent time in a mosh pit would know that there’s not a lot of room to spread out, and it’s not an ideal environment for a bag full of camera gear. Sometimes the photo pit is not much better. Given she is usually negotiating her way through tiny spaces, it’s not surprising that Ruby works with a minimal setup. She has shot almost exclusively with the Canon EOS 5D III and the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 lens for the last five years.

‘At the smaller shows, it's definitely a lot more hectic where there'll be no barrier or anything, and you just have to get involved at the same time as shooting which can be fun and also the worst thing ever.’

Recently, Ruby added the EF 70-200mm f/2.8 lens to her kit. She explains that she generally will only use the longer lens at festivals, but it has quickly become her favourite lens to shoot with. The longer focal length allows her to isolate subjects of interest in a crowd while retaining some background context. She also likes taking posed portraits at festivals and loves the bokeh that results from shooting wide open with some golden hour sunlight in the background.

Photo by Ruby Boland

‘It (Canon gear) just lasts forever, and it's seriously everything proof. I've had drinks spilled on it and been shooting in the pouring rain.’

For up-and-coming photographers looking to make their way into the world of music photography, Ruby strongly recommends investing in a quality lens rather than getting caught up on body specs. Using flash is generally prohibited at concerts, so stage lighting is usually all there is to work with. A fast lens is invaluable for shooting in low-light conditions. Ruby explains that she almost always leaves her aperture set to f/2.8, with everything else dependent on the show’s lighting. Sometimes this means cranking the ISO, slowing the shutter speed and hoping for the best.

Most of Ruby’s post work is done in Lightroom, but occasionally she’ll experiment in Photoshop to mix things up. One of her personal favourite photos is of Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine and was a file she almost binned because it was overexposed. But instead of trashing it, Ruby opened it up in Photoshop and set to work solving the issues. She pulled the highlights back from the brink of oblivion, removed background distractions and added a star overlay to reintroduce some atmosphere. As a final harmonic touch, she colour matched the stars to Florence’s dress, and the resulting image became one of her most popular.

‘It kind of just blew up on Instagram and Twitter and still gets shared a lot today.’

Her energetic and punchy images of the Australian music scene have earned her a tidy 42K followers on Instagram. Relying predominantly on social media as a means of networking, Ruby is an active presence on the photo-sharing platform as well as on Twitter, which she says is a great space to connect with others in the music industry.

Ruby's just getting started on her professional bucket list despite having already photographed numerous notable artists, including music legends Crowded House and Midnight Oil. She is keen to work internationally, and has Coachella high on her list, feeling her bold and colourful style would suit the Californian music and arts festival well. Coldplay is also high on her list, as well as the Jonas Brothers and Harry Styles.

Check out the full interview here to learn more about Ruby and how she worked her way into the highly competitive field of music photography.