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.

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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