technology, photography, music

My journey with music photography

Photography has something that, in retrospect, has always been a part of me, despite my having ignored it for a very long time. Growing up I had shot countless rolls of Tri-X Pan 400 with my dad’s camera, and at summer camp learned to process the film and print to paper. I was the photographer for my high school newspaper (as well as the editor) so I had some sense of how to shoot on a deadline, create printable images, etc. I had some basic techniques for manipulating the output, dodging and burning, “pushing” the iso, overexposing, etc. Then, it was off to college, and I hardly looked at a camera again for more than 15 years.

A little over a year ago, I decided to rekindle my interest in photography. It was born out of a desire to express myself creatively (something that I don’t do in my day job as an engineering-type-guy) I was further inspired by several friends who are excellent photographers, and I wanted to see if I could create compelling imagery like they have. I bought a used dSLR (Nikon d70s) and an all-in-one zoom lens (Tamron 28-300 VR) from a friend of mine who was upgrading, and I started walking around New York taking pictures (mostly landscape and architecture). I immediately noticed that the technology of cameras has evolved significantly in 15 years, and that there are many things you can do with digital that you could never do with film. Being a digital sort of guy this should have come as no surprise…

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Governor’s Island

Getting up to speed on digital

The first thing that I noticed was obvious: I could shoot as many pictures as I wanted, and see the results immediately, for no incremental cost beyond the camera itself. Next I noted that ISO was just another knob to be tweaked on the camera, and was not a function of any physical property of the film being used, rather a setting on the sensor that was recording the image. You pay a price in noise and image quality for pushing it, but you can capture images beyond what you could with film easily, and fix a lot of the noise problems later. There was also this thing called White Balance, which I mostly ignored at first, and later learned to deal with in post for the most part. Lastly, I realized early on that that the line between shooting and post production is a lot more fluid with digital than film, especially if you shoot RAW and use a non destructive editor like LightRoom or Aperture.

These are very obvious things to understand about digital photography, but knowing them and integrating them into your picture taking are 2 different things. It took a while for me to get the hang of the workflow and additional knobs I had at my disposal.

Later on, more subtle things began revealing themselves. In film photography, it is generally understood that you can pull pictures back from overexposure but there is little to nothing you can do about underexposure. As it turns out, this is the reverse of what is true for digital. In fact you can pull quite a lot of shadow detail out of an underexposed digital picture, but if you blow your highlights, it’s pretty much game over. There are very good technical discussions on why this is on the web, mostly having to do with the way CMOS sensors convert light into data, but I won’t go into that here. But it generally means you need to keep an eye out for overexposure, and thats why most dSLRs have a feature which shows you blown highlights in your playback view so you can see them immediately and correct your camera settings.

What to shoot?

Once I had a semi grasp on how to use my camera I turned my attention to what I wanted to shoot. And this is where things got interesting. I started out shooting landscapes and architecture stuff in new york, learning about composition, and trying to control the basic mechanics of shooting static imagery. It was a great way to learn, and I still enjoy it. But lets face it, there is a ton of landscape photography out there, and unless you are doing something truly innovative, it’s pretty boring. Another major problem with architecture / landscape shooting in NYC is that there tends to be a LOT of people around, which can seriously interfere with taking good shots. However, this taught me one extremely important lesson about photography: the discipline is all about patience. You might wait hours for the perfect shot, say a sunset, and then something environmental will interfere with it at the last second. The only thing you can do is come back again, if that is even possible.

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Brigantine Island, New Jersey

But like I said, static landscape photography started to get a bit boring, so I started looking for other things to shoot. Fortuitously, around this time, my Tamron lens broke, so I was forced to change up my equipment a bit. I purchased a fast prime lens (Nikon 50mm/1.4 AF-D) and started playing with that in even lower light situations, shooting people and trying some low light stuff. I started playing with some more artistic style shooting, like leaving the lens open on bulb and painting with a flashlight, etc. Fast prime lenses are great because you can pretty much do anything with one, so long as you can zoom with your feet. I got my 28-300 back, and subsequently started playing with macro, which I also liked a lot. But then a photographer friend of mine offered me a pretty cool opportunity: Shooting the NYC halloween parade. I picked up a flash unit (Nikon SB-600) and off I went.

I immediately loved it. I had access to create images that most people would never be able to see for themselves. It was real time, there was no second shot, or coming back later. It was now or never, and you had to get it right. And this is when I learned another great lesson of photography: necessity is the mother of invention, and you have to work with what you have. The d70′s sensor is not all that great at shooting at night, and the SB-600 is not that powerful a flash beyond about 10-12′ or so I needed to get close, and push the ISO. I shot fast and furious, trying out many combinations of settings, aperture, shutter speed, etc, and I think that was the night I learned to control depth of field by instinct rather than by thinking about it. I think i took over 1000 images that night, which is totally excessive, but the learning experience was priceless. In 3 hours of shooting I learned more about event photography than I could possibly have imagined. Most importantly, I learned that it was the kind of photography I wanted to focus on.
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NYC Halloween Parade

Music

Seeing as there aren’t tons of parades to shoot, I needed to find events to attend with some more regularity. I have been an aficionado of music and specifically the NY live music scene for over a decade. It is something that has been a pretty major part of my life for that entire time; at one point I was seeing something like 200 shows a year. I had moved away from it the past few years, but it was still near and dear to my heart, and I wanted to combine my new hobby with something I had been enjoying for what seemed like forever.

I have a number of friends who do music photography so I started talking to them about it. I know some folks in the music business, so I reached out to them as well. I have come to appreciate this as extremely fortunate, because it often can be very difficult to get access to shoot shows, especially in the beginning. Generally speaking you can slip in with a point-and-shoot, but bringing in a dSLR with a telephoto generally requires a pass. Fortunately, I was able to get access to do that pretty much right away.

The first show I shot was John Prine at the Wellmont Theatre. I will never forget the experience. First off, the man is a legend, and I was psyched to see him live to begin with. I was given the rules of engagement: first 3 songs down in front, no flash. So, down in front with my photo pass and d70s I went. John Prine isn’t a particularly animated show, not a lot of flashy lighting effects, or jumping around stage. Just a guy with a guitar and a microphone. And thats where I picked up my first few tidbits about music photography:

Microphone stands are the bane of your existence. Nothing messes up a perfectly good closeup like a poorly placed mic stand. If only they would think of the poor photographers when placing them on stage Second, I was very frustrated by the lighting, because it wasn’t a flashy concert, it really pushed the ability of my zoom lens (which was f/5.6 fully extended to 200mm) and the ISO of my body to the point where photos were basically not there. I ultimately tried dropping my shutter speed way below acceptable tolerances. I tried leaning on things, but to no avail. My 3 songs were up, and I really didn’t get any good shots. But again, there was a silver lining and a lesson to be learned: Being up front doesn’t really guarantee great shots, and in fact some of your best shots will not be from the pit or other “special access” areas.

I went back to my seat, which was near the back of the auditorium, somewhat dejected. I really wanted to take some great pictures, mostly because I really enjoy John Prine’s music. I decided to keep my camera out and see what I could do from the back of the house. As it turned out, being able to sit down and rest my camera on the seat in front of me was the medicine my photos needed that night. I took some great pictures with extremely low shutter speeds and ended up with plenty of usable prints. Again, necessity is the mother of invention, and you have to work with what you have. Indeed, being adaptable is a key component to success.

That being said, I also learned that what I had in terms of gear was not going to be up to snuff if I really wanted to take great music photos. The 50mm prime lens was going to be useful, but i would need to get really close to use it at the lowest f-stops owing to the DOF and bokeh issues. This made it impractical to use as a primary lens for most shows. The Tamron was *way* too slow, it was almost F/4 by the time it got out to 70mm, which is basically unusable unless the stage is fully illuminated. Its a great lens if you are shooting outside during the day or at family functions, but for serious pro level work, its got a lot of things going against it, even aside from it being slow: falloff, vignetting, barrel distortion, chroma problems, etc. The d70s was and is a great camera. It takes amazing pictures, but it’s sensor is now almost 5 years old. You can’t push its ISO much beyond 400-800 without getting grain you cannot fix in post. It also is only a 6MP camera, so if you want to blow up and crop, you have far less pixels to work with than you would with a newer camera.

In other words, it was time to buy some new gear…

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John Prine @ The Wellmont Theatre

Next Up: The dreaded NAS (Nikon Acquisition Syndrome)

Buying Equipment. A.K.A. the dreaded NAS

I would like to preface this with the fact that I’m pretty sure that Canon users aren’t exempt from this syndrome, I just know the disease as NAS. – Nikon Acquisition Syndrome. Personally I am not a Nikon evangelist, I just happen to know more people with Nikons so I buy them. It is handy for support, gear swapping, and such. So replace any of my gear suggestions with the Canon equivalent as necessary if you roll Canon-style, and know I would just as quickly have bought a Canon 5DmkII with L lenses as a Nikon d700 with Nikon’s pro lenses

So first I decided to look into camera bodies, which in retrospect is the wrong way to approach this. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have ended up in the same place, only faster and having spent less money on interim lenses. My advice is spend your money on your lenses first, and worry about the body later. But in my case, I had no way of knowing what lenses I would need, so a little iteration and (expensive) trial and error occurred.

The first decision I needed to make was whether or not to go full frame (FX) or not. I knew that doing so would add a significant cost to everything I purchased from there on out. Luckily the 50mm lens I had was a FX lens, so I would be able to use that regardless. I weighed the pros and cons, and decided that since I was basically investing from scratch in this camera system, I might as well go FX since that is where the industry is headed anyway, or at least that was my perception at the time. Throwing out DX lenses for a later upgrade to FX didn’t appeal, and I knew that I wanted to maintain my investment in lenses. This made my choice of body easy. There was no way I was going to buy a D3 as my first camera, so the d700 was my only full frame choice. I have several friends who have them and they love them, so that was a no brainer. It’s an amazing camera, the sensor is incredible. I usually leave it at ISO 800 but I’ve pushed it to 1600 and a few times to 3200 with no problems (aside from having to do some noise reduction on the back end)

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They Might Be Giants @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

On to lenses. So I knew i wanted my kit to have a wide angle, a prime, and a telephoto. I figured that would cover most of my shooting eventualities, and cover the music work I wanted to do well. I already had the prime, so I started looking into the wide and the tele. I wasn’t ready to drop money on pro lenses just yet, so I bought the 18-35/3.5-4.5 wide lens for $400, and I’m very glad I did. For the wide angle work I do with music it is totally fine, and the 17-35/2.8 would have been overkill at $1700.

The telephoto turned out to be where I got stuck. After a few more shoots, I quickly discovered that the 70-200 class of lens was going to be by far the most useful lens in my bag, and it is still the lens I leave on my camera 90% of the time. The first one i bought was the el-cheapo Nikon 70-300 G 3.5-5.6 lens. To this day, I have no idea why i did that, aside from the fact that maybe I was still reeling from spending $3000 on a camera body. It was still way too slow, and luckily Adorama gave me a good buyback price on it when I traded it in.

I then upgraded to the Sigma 70-200/2.8 which I shot for quite a bit. Its a very nice, fast lens. It has 2 drawbacks: no VR, and shoddy build quality. After about 500 frames, the HSM motor gave up the ghost, which required over a month of repair time. If you get a good copy of a Sigma lens, they are great, but I don’t think I’ll ever be buying one of their lenses again. During the time the lens was being repaired, I decided to try some of Nikon’s offerings. First i tried out their 80-200/2.8, which is about $150 more than the Sigma. I shot one show with it and returned it. That thing is a tank. its heavy and the focus is slow (it’s an AF-D lens) and still lacks VR which makes it less than ideal for shooting music.

And then, a great thing happened. Nikon released a new version of their 70-200 / 2.8 pro lens, so the used market for the version 1 of the lens opened up and I was able to get a copy of that lens for about $1500. Let me just say right now that this is the gold standard of 2.8 zoom lenses. The thing is fast, sharp as hell, has perfect bokeh, and built like a tank. The VR is amazing, I can handhold that lens down to about 1/25th of a second. In short it is without a doubt the lens you want for shooting music, if you can afford it. And the good news is that right now, you probably can, the used market for it is pretty good (i’ve seen them as low as $1300) But because I have the NAS in the worst way, so long as there is something better to try, I’m probably going to get suckered into it eventually. This is what happened next:

Recently I had read some reviews of the new version of the 70-200/2.8 (the VRII) that suggested that the VR was even better. I had already decided I wanted to upgrade my 70-200 to a new copy so that I got a warranty for it, since it was now my main lens. So I found a buyer for my version 1 and went for it. It did not disappoint. I can easily hand hold that down to 1/10th of a second, which translates into it being nearly a full 2 stops faster. Not that I would want to shoot music with a shutter speed that slow, but what it really means is that I can either close down the aperture a bit for more depth of field, or drop the iso down to 400 instead of 800 for better color and clarity. The only issue, and this is widely covered elsewhere, is that they changed the optical formula for this lens, and significantly decreased the magnification of this lens. The net effect of it is that it has a closer minimum focal length, (great for the pit) but its overall magnification at close range is reduced. Basically you don’t get a full 200mm equivalent of magnification until about 25’ of focal distance. Honestly, for the kind of shooting that i do, its a totally fine tradeoff: the minimum focal distance being less means I change to my 50mm far less often in the pit, and I get closeups that are just fine. Throw in an extra 2 stops of light, and we have a pretty compelling upgrade over the first edition. Is it worth the price difference? I can’t really asses that for you, but I know I’m not going back.

So in the end my usual kit for a show is:

Nikon d700 with MD-B10 grip + 2 batteries
70-200mm / 2.8 VRII
18-35mm / 3.5-4.5
50mm / 1.4 AF-D

Other stuff always in my bag

Surefire P9 flashlight
Microfiber cloth
Extra battery
2 extra memory cards
stack of business cards

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Vampire Weekend @ Webster Hall

Other Gear Tips

• Be mindful of your NAS… The rabbit hole is deep my friend, and you don’t need to buy everything at once

• Get the fastest glass you can afford. If you can’t afford the new $2,500 Nikon 70-200/2.8 check out the $900 Sigma which you can probably get used for $600 if you try. You don’t get VR if you don’t buy the Nikon but it is the speed of the glass (aperture) that really matters. The difference between fast glass and slow glass is huge, and cannot be overstated. No single investment will affect the outcome of your shots more than the speed and quality of your glass. ‘nuff said.

• If you are just starting out, get a 50mm/1.4 which should run about $350, or less used. You will have to zoom with your feet, but you will not have any problems with light, though controlling depth of field and bokeh will be your new challenges. Shooting at 1.4 gives you a razor’s edge margin for focus, but the good news is that everything is in focus at infinity

• Get a vertical grip for your camera. (assuming you don’t have a camera that already has one built in) Shooting the long way is often useful for poking through the crowd and covering the entire stage top to bottom. Plus, holding your camera w/o a vertical grip for extended periods is awkward and tiring. The MD-B10 for my d700 was about $300, and worth every penny.

• Get a good, bright flashlight. (see below)

• Get a good, comfortable bag. This is a highly personal thing. I use a tarmac velocity 9x. Find something comfortable for you that you can move gear, and lenses in particular in and out of without looking.

• Get insurance. I use PPIP by Hays, but you can cover it under your homeowners / renters insurance. Be sure you know what it covers, things like lens drops, people spilling a beer on your camera, etc, can happen, so make sure you are covered.

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Battles @ Terminal 5

Next Up: Software

Software

There are a lot of options for software. I edit on a Mac, but some of the same software packages are available for the PC (excepting of course iPhoto and Aperture) I break the software available down into 2 main categories: Image Editors and Image Organizers. Some software has a little bit of both categories, some are simply focused on doing one. Here are some of the ones I’ve tried:

iPhoto – This is a good entry level Image Organizer with some rudimentary photo editing capabilities. It is passable at organizing photos, but I feel it lacks some things that are necessary for processing large amounts of images. Many of its photo editing capabilities are dumbed down in a way that makes them hard to use to fix the sort of color problems you are going to have with music photos. It is also not particularly good at white balancing RAW imagery. You probably want to avoid iPhoto unless you are a really casual shooter.

Aperture - This is iPhotos big brother, primarily an Image Organizer. It has better organizational skills and far better integrated editing capabilities, including non-destructive layered editing of RAW files. It supports categorization and metadata in a sensible way, and its handling of RAW files is pretty good. My biggest issue with aperture is that it stores your entire library in one huge file/folder combo called an aplibrary file. This makes it hard to manipulate images in other programs, and backing up your library requires you use Aperture to do so. It maintains the hierarchy and the metadata for all images and edits inside that file, so if anything happens to it, you are in a lot of trouble. I like aperture, and I used it for a while, but once i got over 10-20,000 images, I needed something that scales a bit better, and allows me to have multiple libraries that I can merge, export, and re-import.

Google Picasa – Primarily an Image Organizer, but provides some very rudimentary editing capabilities. The best thing about it is it is free. The second best thing about it is it directly integrates with Google’s Picasa, blogspot, etc. for sharing and publishing. If all you want to do is crop, white balance, and color correct your images and pop them up on the web, this tool may be all you ever need. I found it’s editing abilities to be lacking, but the organizational stuff is totally adequate as it doesn’t store files in a single library. This allows you to use something like Photoshop with it for your heavy duty editing and still maintain a disk full of folder and files. Overall a nice tool, especially if you already have a solid Image Editor.

Gimp (GNU Image Processor) – Image Editor. On a mac this runs under X11 so it is painfully slow to launch. It is an open-source alternative to Photoshop and gets the job done. It is hard to argue with free, especially when it comes to image editing software. I don’t particularly like it but thats mostly because I have photoshop and have used it for a long time. It may work perfectly for you, and if you combine it with Picasa you get a free solution with most of the features of the closed source stuff.

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Flying Lotus @ Terminal 5

Adobe Photoshop (with Bridge) – Image Editor. This is the standard by which all other editing software is measured. Its been around since computers have had mice, and it has steadily evolved into a bloated, feature-rich juggernaut of Microsoft Excel proportions. Personally I use about $15 worth of Photoshop’s features, but when you need the Clone Stamp tool, you need the Clone Stamp tool. It also facilitates the use of layers which are extremely useful for adjusting certain things in images. And, of course, there are the bevy of plugins that are available, some of which are near requirements for low light photography (things like sharpeners and noise reduction) Get your hands on a copy if you can (its actually affordable if you get the student discount) The biggest problem with Photoshop is that its ability to organize images is terrible. They tried to fix this by basically replacing the “Open…” dialog box with something called Bridge, which doesn’t even rise to the level of iPhoto in my opinion. Additionally, importing raw imagery into Photoshop requires the use of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which allows you to do preliminary white balancing and adjustments before editing, but I prefer to do that while simultaneously processing the rest of the image. In my workflow, I only use Photoshop as an editor.

Adobe Lightroom – Image Organizer and Editor. I find Lightroom to be the perfect balance of editor and organizer for the kind of shooting and workflow I need. I do 95% of my post work in LR. It organizes without getting in the way, It has some really smart things for keyword and metadata manipulation (see keyword painting) and its tab approach: library, develop, web makes a lot of sense to me. It supports all manner of external editors, including photoshop. It has a plugin architecture for exporting, which allows me to publish in a wide variety of ways, including setting up presets for various clients who have specific output requirements. It does image watermarking, which I like for publishing to public places like flickr. Raw handling is flawless (it is ACR under the hood). The editing side is amazing. There are adjustments for almost everything you would want for a photograph, it’s all non-destructive, and you get to see a list of your edits so you can easily roll back to previous states. Best of all you can copy and paste adjustments from one image to another, so if you have a series of photos where they are all underexposed blueberries, you can fix one and apply it to the rest. Bottom line: if you are serious, get yourself a copy. Its not that expensive (at least not if you are used to spending hundreds on camera gear) and the time it will save you will pay for itself in extra sleep in about a month.

Photoshop / Lightroom Plugins

• Nik dfine – Noise Reduction plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. A tad on the pricey side, but I find it worth it. It is one of the rare cases where the default automatic setting works well much of the time. Which is nice, because the nitty gritty internals of noise reduction is pretty arcane, and it’s something I still have a lot to learn about.

• Nik sharpener – Sharpening plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. When I need to sharpen beyond what the built in

• Noise Ninja – Noise Reduction plugin for Photoshop, also has a standalone app. I’ve only used this a few times, but it works quite well. I have already invested in Nik’s dfine so I didn’t see a need to spend more time / money on this one, but it does offer extremely granular control over the noise reduction. Several of my friends swear by it.

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Moby @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

Next Up: Editing and Post Processing (using your software)

Editing and Postprocessing

So, now I’ve taken an entire shows worth of photos, and I have a memory card with 2 or 300 photos on it. Its a sad reality, but 90% of them are going to suck. How do I sort through them? Chances are, if I am shooting for someone, I have a pretty tight deadline to turn around my best 5-10 photos. Often this happens late at night after the show is over, when all you want to do is hit the sack I use Adobe Lightroom to edit and organize my photos, so most of this is geared towards that, but many of the concepts are the same regardless of the software you use.

The very first thing I do after I have imported all of my photos (or if you are slick you can do it *while* you import) is to tag my photos. I use lightroom’s key wording panel on the right side, And I usually fill out the Title and the Caption spots, as well as adding any relevant metadata keywords to the photo (usually the artists name, and the name of the venue) Doing this saves me all sorts of time later when I export my photos elsewhere, as they are pre-captioned and tagged. I also put a copyright and some other contact info in the EXIF data. I cannot stress enough the importance of doing the tagging, you will kick yourself down the road for not doing it, I promise you. What I have described is the minimum, I know a lot of folks who do a lot more with tagging.

Next thing I do is sort. I take a 2 pass approach to this. First I throw out the junk, and then I pick the best of what is left and work on those, and I tailor how many depending on how many photos I need to produce (usually 10-12) It makes no sense to even spend the time to white balance photos until you have done these 2 passes, because you will be wasting effort on photos you don’t care about. Note that I don’t throw any photos away. Ever. Storage is cheap, and I see no reason to throw away stuff that might be useful some day.

To do this I use the Flag and Color attributes in LightRoom because i can use the attribute bar to quickly show me the subsets of the entire set of images. Here’s how I do it: First I put on the caps lock key which causes lightroom to advance to the next image after I’ve set the attribute of an image. I then select the first image, and set a flag attribute for each image using the following keys: P for pick, U for un-flagged (which basically means skip this image) and X for rejected. Mostly I focus on the PIcks, but if an image is completely unusable, I X it so i ignore it in future passes. Next I use the attribute panel to filter out everything except the Picks, and then i go through those (usually I get down to about 40 or 50 picks from the original 300) and select the best images by setting their color with the 6, 7, or 8 keys. Now I’m down to about 15-20 images I want to work on, and I select for that color attribute so I am only looking at images I care about. This entire process takes me less than 10 minutes usually. Whats good about this approach is if it turns out I need to go back and find additional images for my select few to send out, I don’t have to re scan the entire set of photos, I can simply go back to the “Picked” images.

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Thievery Corporation @ Terminal 5

Now that I have my photos to work on it is time to make adjustments. Many many excellent books and webpages have been written about how to edit photos and I’m certainly not going to try to get into that in any depth here. I’m just going to touch on a few things that I’ve found useful. Generally speaking I do my cropping before I do my adjustments, again to be sure that I have an image worth tweaking, because the rest of the editing is far more time consuming than sorting or cropping.

White Balance

You’re shooting RAW, right? So you need to set white balance, and often that is very hard due to the very bright colored lights that tend to be flashing at rock shows. The automatic mode almost *never* works. Feel free to give it a go, but usually it makes things worse. I use the eyedropper tool and pick a neutral spot. Often the dots on the frets of a guitar are white, and a good place to pick neutral colors. Other options includes the whites of people’s eyes, shirts, logos on amps or other equipment, basically anything you know is going to be a solid, neutral color. It is still likely you are going to have to tweak it with the sliders after you dropper.

Often people are still going to come out looking like blueberries. Thats the UV lighting messing with your color balance. Correct it as much as you can and tweak the rest with HSL / Color sliders (see below) The main goal is to make the skin tone look sane and normal without trashing the rest of the image. I use the eyedropper and then adjust the sliders until I get something that looks good. Play around, you’ll get the hang of it.

Brightness / Contrast / Exposure / Blacks / Fill Lights / Highlights

A lot of times I will get a shot that is underexposed, or overexposed in one part, or some combination. That’s not too surprising considering I am shooting in extremely low light with huge amounts of focused colored spotlights. There is an “auto” setting that sometimes works to pull back shadow detail, but lets face it: “Auto” is for sallies. These are big dog exposure problems, and you are going to want to use all of the tools at your disposal.

Generally speaking these tools manipulate sections of the histogram you see. In the develop module of lightroom you can actually manipulate the histogram directly, but I still prefer the sliders. Most of the sliders are oppositional. That is, when I tweak one I’m going to want to balance that tweak with compensating moves with the others. For example if I crank the exposure and the brightness to bring out an underexposed image, I’m probably also going to have to bring up the blacks or the picture will get this grey washed out look to it, and the areas that are supposed to be black will not. It’s a constant back and forth, a yin and yang of adjustments until you balance them into the best image possible. The history panel in lightroom is good for backtracking and seeing if you are making things better or worse, and the \ key (backslash) will quickly toggle from the original to your most recent edits, so you can see if you have moved in the right direction or should start over.

This is where I do the bulk of my manipulations, and you could write a book on just these controls alone (after all this is basically what black and white photography was all about for over a century)

Saturation and Vibrance

Saturation and vibrance control the variety and “amount” of colors in your image. I use them with a very light touch, because over saturation is very noticeable and unless you are doing it on purpose for artistic effect, generally isn’t all that pleasing to the eye. (at least not mine) Sometimes I get images that have lots of colored light in them, and I want to mute that color a bit and bring out the band member, or sometimes I’ve had to seriously wack the white balance to get rid of the blueberry effect, and now i’m stuck with a color washed image that needs a kick. This is when vibrance and saturation come in. Generally speaking saturation is the broad stroke, and vibrance is the more refined touch. Thats not exactly what’s happening, but its how I think about it. Most of the time I de-saturate a tiny bit (we’re talking 4 or 5 on the outside) and then crank up the vibrance to compensate.

HSL / Color

These sliders control specific colors in your image. In most non-music photography you don’t really use them unless you are doing something artistic. But they have one very specific use in my music photo editing: getting rid of the dreaded blueberry face. Used in combination with white balance and desaturation, I can restore the color of someone’s face to a relatively human tone by removing blues and/or red tones from the image. Obviously if I go too far with it, you get a very strangely colored image, but it has saved the day more times than I can count.

Noise Reduction / Sharpness

High ISO shooting generates grain, and shooting things that are moving at low shutter speeds makes it so that even properly focused images are a bit soft around the edges. The easiest way to fix both issues is to use a combination of noise reduction and sharpening tools to crisp up the image. I generally reduce noise before I sharpen. Otherwise you are simply sharpening noise, and since noise tends to be disparate spots with defined edges in your image, they will get sharpened a lot, and it will be noticeable. Honestly I usually stick with just the noise reduction and I only sharpen if its an image I really really want to use but it is not quite sharp enough to publish. Note that there are both sharpening and NR features built into both lightroom and photoshop, but I find that external plugins are usually easier to use and produce better results for me.

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Thievery Corporation @ Terminal 5 (this guy was a soft, noisy, blueberry before post processing

Next Up: Shooting Tips

Shooting Tips

These are some general photo shooting tips that I have picked up that are especially important to internalize when shooting at a music venue. In many ways shooting live music at a club is the worst case scenario for photography. You are shooting basically in the dark, except for those huge colored extremely bright lights that are flashing and changing directions intermittently. The following have helped me cope with that, and still get good photos.

• Know your gear & settings

Probably the most important of these is to know how slow a shutter speed you personally can hand hold your camera at. Know how far you can push the ISO of your camera without it coming out so grainy you cannot fix it in post. Know what the depth of field of your lens is at 2.8 so you pick a good spot to focus. Know the optimal settings for you to shoot with. In my case I generally shoot with the 70-200 at ISO 800, f/2.8 and 1/40th of a second, and I make small adjustments from there as necessary. Thats what works for me, find out what works for you

• Use Manual mode

Take the training wheels off. Aperture priority is handy and works well in a lot of cases, but there is no substitute for taking full control of your camera. And as for Program mode (full auto): don’t get $300 worth of your $2000 camera rig by allowing the computer to make all your exposure decisions for you. Despite some initial trial and error, you will be a better photographer for it.

• Shoot RAW

There is no reason to let the camera compress your images for you. You can do that later. You want every possible bit of data you can get. You will definitely want to be doing your own white balancing in post, given the crazy lighting you are going to encounter at clubs. Just as with the manual mode, don’t let your camera make decisions for you.

• Use the AF-ON button or equivalent if you have it.

This decouples focus from shooting, so that your camera will shoot regardless of having the image fully in focus. Also allows you to set your focus for a specific distance and shoot a bunch of pictures, hopefully one of which will be in focus. A good practice here is to focus on the tip of the microphone and leave the focus there. The front man will stick close to it (of course this depends on how far away you are) It will take you a bit of time to get used to the difference, but once you do, you will never go back. Even if you don’t have a specific AF-ON button, you can often reprogram other buttons on your camera to achieve this outcome. Give it a go.

Nada Surf @ Music Hall of WIlliamsburg

• Use spot focus and matrix metering.

Unless you know for certain that you can meter better than your camera use matrix metering. The lighting at shows is highly complex, and there are many sources, and it’s constantly changing. If you meter for a specific point (spot) likely the light will be radically different between the time you focus and you release the shutter. This is one time to let the camera do the heavy lifting. On the opposite end, use spot focusing. If you let the camera try to put the whole scene in focus, especially at f/2.8 with a narrow DOF you can be sure the part of the image that you want in focus won’t be in focus by the time you depress the shutter.

• Watch out for blown highlights

My camera has mode that when I hit the playback button it will show me all of the blown highlights by blinking those areas as red. Some blown highlights are unavoidable, like the lights that are blasting the stage. But if I see the faces of the band blinking it means it’s time to adjust the exposure, usually I do it with aperture because I’d rather have the increased DOF than a faster shutter unless there is a lot of motion on the stage. Remember there is a lot you can do to repair photos in post, but there is no recovering from a blown highlight.

• Mind your histogram

The histogram shows you a lot of valuable information about the data in the picture. A lot can be said about it, but what I find useful is not necessarily where the poits in the curve are, but rather is the curve bunched up to the left (underexposed), bunched to the right (over exposed) or does it not even cover the entire range. If I don’t see at least 1 pixel of dots all the way across the entire graph, I know I am missing data, and I make exposure adjustments accordingly. Like I said, these are basics, there’s a lot to know about the histogram, and there are great resources out there on it.

• Images don’t have to be tack sharp

These are photos of a music show, afterall. They are dynamic, emotional, and in most cases involve tons of movement. This isn’t portrait photography. A little blur now and then is OK. A little lens flare now and again is OK. A little bit of odd lighting (excepting of course the blueberry effect, more on that later) is OK. However, you do need to make sure something is in focus, or it will just end up looking like drunken pictures from your last sorority mixer.

• Don’t be afraid to take lots of pictures (especially at the beginning)

There is no film involved here, and therefore zero incremental costs. The only downside to shooting hundreds of photos is you will have to sort through them and edit them later. So fire away. Take photos 2 at a time, just on the off chance that you wobbled your camera by pressing the shutter release on the first frame. Try many different exposure combos and angles. You have nothing to lose except a little editing time in post. When I shoot a show, I shoot anywhere between 150 and 300 photos. That might be a lot but I’m sure to get 10-12 good ones, every time.

• When you publish photos, less is more.

This is solid advice for online publishing in general. I know you took 40 or 50 AMAZING photos at your last shoot that you know the entire world is dying to see. But if you publish that many, I guarantee they will only look at the first 5 or 6, and then zip through the rest or leave entirely. People’s attention span on the web is extremely short (seconds) so publishing 5 or less photos (usually I do 2 or 3) is the way to go. I heard someone say it this way “Pick your best 3 or 4 photos and everyone will assume that the rest of them are that good”

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Matisyahu @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

Next Up: Live Music Specific Tips

Live Music Specific Tips

Here a few things I’ve picked up along the way that have helped me out when shooting at a music venue. None are hard and fast rules, but they’ve helped me take the photos I want with the minimum of hassle, and all the while still enjoying the show

• Know the venue

Know where the best spots to shoot are, how to navigate there the most efficiently, etc. Find spots that give you a good variety of angles. I tend toward the upper back corners, balconies, and the side corners of the stage. These angles mitigate the dreaded microphone stand issue. If it is a new venue for you, get there early, or shoot the opening act, just to get a feel for the flow of the place. It is also helpful to know where the traffic jams are going to be inside the club (around bars, bathrooms, other narrow places) so you can avoid them when you are moving around.

• Move around

Photos all taken from the same vantage are pretty boring. When I shoot, I want to create a feel for being at the show, and the only way I’ve found to do that is to take pictures from everywhere. A friend of mine who shoots movie stills for a living suggested that I take “establishing shots” of the crowd to capture the feeling of being there in addition to the closeups of the band members. I like the results I get from doing so. Of course this doesn’t really work if you are shooting a huge show at an arena, but for the smaller clubs, festivals etc, its the way to go.

• Don’t be afraid to ask folks to let you in for a minute.

Generally, if you are polite, I’ve found that people are totally willing to allow you to shoot in front of them for a few moments, so long as you are quick and polite about it. If they are huffy or unwilling, move on, usually someone will let you take a few shots. Just be ready to stick and move when they do.

• Use your flashlight

It is an interesting phenomena, but pretty much anyone wielding a flashlight at a show (pointing it at the ground in front of you of course) can part the masses of people in the crowd and allow you to move through the crowd with your piles of gear. I’m not at all suggesting you be a jerk about it, and some venues may not appreciate it, but it is a useful tactic. It’s not going to get you to the front of the stage, but it may well get you back from the front without stepping on bags, toes, or drinks. Its also handy when you drop your lens cap in the pit and can’t find it.

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Grace Potter @ Terminal 5

• Get good at switching lenses in the dark
        
This will happen over time if you shoot long enough, but its a skill you will want to develop. Switching between the 50 and the 70-200 in the pit when you only have 3 songs to shoot is something you are going to want to do fast and effectively.

• You will never get access if you don’t ask for it ahead of time.

Work media contacts, magazines, blogs, bands directly, PR houses, your friends brothers mom who used to date a music promoter. Whatever you gotta do, work every angle you can. (without crossing lines of course) Don’t just show up to a venue with your dSLR and 70-200 lens and expect to walk in the door, you are probably going to be sad if you do.

• Respect venue staff, even if it means you don’t get to shoot where you want to or when you want to.

Likely you will come back to that venue at some point, and you always want to leave people with the impression you are a professional, respectful individual. The other night I was shooting at a venue and the door folks gave me the wrong kind of pass (VIP instead of Photo) and they wouldn’t let me into the pit. The show was about to start, and I had very little time to get the right credentials. I didn’t argue, the issue got resolved and the security folks and I had a good laugh about it. The security guys have a difficult and shitty job, don’t make it worse. (even if they are being toolboxes)
Shooting a show is a privilege not a right. Act accordingly. (unless you are one of the very few full-time professional music photographers, in which case you probably aren’t reading this

• Don’t shoot with a flash unless specifically requested/required.

It messes up all the other photographers to have your flash going off in the pit, plus distracts the performers and fans. Honestly, you shouldn’t need a flash if you have the right glass, and realistically the output of your flash is going to pale in comparison with any of the lighting on the stage. So please, as a courtesy to the rest of us, leave the flash at home, and for goodness sakes don’t try to use the tiny fill flash built into your camera. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, i.e. if you are working for the band and doing promotional shots or you are in an extremely dark venue, but even in that case, courtesy would dictate you don’t go popping off your flash like its a fashion shoot

• Don’t be a pit douche.

Sharing is caring in the pit. Its a cramped, loud place, and everyone is moving very fast, because we all have the same 3 songs to get our shots. Some general kindness rules include: Don’t bump people while they are taking a shot, duck under their lenses. Tap people on the shoulder gently when you want to pass them. Keep moving to allow others to take their shots, and also so as to not block the paying crowd members who had the dedication to be in the front row. Don’t get up in the artists face, and if you are going to stand on the steps in the pit, make sure you do so quickly so you don’t block the crowd or annoy the artists. It’s all about the courtesy.

• Above all, have fun.

Put your camera down once in a while and just enjoy the show. It is extremely unlikely you are ever going to get paid any appreciable amount of money for doing live music photography. So it had better be something you enjoy, otherwise lugging 15 pounds of gear to shows a few times a week will soon wear you down into a sullen and jaded burnout. For me this is all about combining 2 things I love to do, hear live music and take photos. I don’t really have an agenda with it, aside from seeing lots of live music, and thats why it stays fun.

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Asobi Seksu @ Joe’s Pub

Next Up: Additional Information

Other Sources of Information

• Other photographers – Best source of information I’ve found is talking to other people who have done this for a while and know their stuff. If you don’t actually know the photographer who took that awesome shot you love, you can still look at their photos, and see what they did. Repeat rinse wash.

• Flickr.com – Flickr is awesome because not only do you get to see quality shots and see who the better photographers are and follow their work, you also, in many cases, get to see the settings on their camera when they took the shot via the EXIF data. This is unbelievably cool and useful.

• Nikonians.org – I find the nikonians blog interesting for general technique, and gear discussions. There are a lot of people on there who have many many years of experience. The forum is heavily moderated, so mind your Ps and Qs, but that generally yields a pretty good signal to noise ratio. The UI looks like it’s from the epoch but it gets the job done. Sadly they made it a paid thing, but its probably worth it. I bought my 70-200 from their sale forum, fwiw.

• Nikongear.com – this is a gear discussion site. pretty good stuff, but probably not as comprehensive as Nikonians, albeit easier to navigate. I joined both, I may or may not renew my subscription to this one, but its not a bad site.

• bythom.com – Thom Hogan’s books are the gold standard of technical manuals for Nikon cameras. If he makes one for your camera, buy it. His site is extremely insightful, and he is one of those guys whom everyone listens to, and for good reason. He’s known to post on nikonians, dpreview, nikongear, etc, so you will see him everywhere. I listen when he does.

• kenrockwell.com – Ken Rockwell is kind of a toolbox, no doubt. But his site is great if you want to learn about every lens that Nikon has ever made, see a picture, get some basic specs, etc. He says basically the same things about every lens, so you can pretty much ignore his commentary, but I still use it, mostly because he’s really good at SEO and his results are the first things that come up when I search for a lens.

• naturfotograf.com – This is Bjorn Rorslet’s site. He is an extremely technical nature photographer, and you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about gear here. His reviews are in depth, and lots of folks respect what he has to say.

• Magic Lantern guides (http://www.larkbooks.com/mlg) – Not quite as good as Thom Hogan IMO but still very good, and available for more cameras. I have both guides for the d700 and I like them both for different reasons. Its nice to be able to flip through an actual book sometimes.

• lynda.com – tutorial videos. I don’t know that I would have purchased this, but we have subscriptions where I work and I’ve found the tutorial videos to be very well done. The great thing is that they break it down into small 5-15 minute chunks so you can hit a few up when you have time without having to commit to an hour long session. They have courseware on *everything* and their catalog is quite deep.

• safaribooksonline.com – books online. I have a subscription to this because I use it for my day job all the time, but they also have an amazing selection of digital photography books and books on the software you will be using. Fantastic resource, but spendy.

• dpreview.com – gear review site. Love the reviews, but you can skip the message boards. They are full of people who think they know more than they do and like to argue with one another in a counterproductive manner. Separating the wheat from the chaff in there is not worth your time with so many other great resources out there. Its really best suited to people buying point and shoots, but I have to mention it because they are very thorough about their technical reviews.

Acknowledgements

These folks have assisted me greatly …Thanks for enduring all my wacky questions, making great suggestions on how to improve, and inspiring me to do it in the first place:

Ben Slayter – http://www.slaytercreative.com/
Stefan Falke – http://www.stefanfalke.com/
Dino Perrucci – http://dinoperrucciphotography.blogspot.com/

A very special thanks to the Bowery Presents folks for giving me a chance to learn by doing, and the opportunity to shoot some excellent music in the process. (http://www.bowerypresents.com) ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Grace Potter and the Nocturnals – Terminal 5