A photographer is me!

List: Lessons learned from doing concert photography for Booty Vortex last night.

• If you can move around at all, having a fast lens is much more important than having a zoom lens. Having a fast zoom lens is even nicer, but those are hideously expensive (and heavy). Sometimes that 50mm f/1.8 lens that you picked up for $90 new is the only lens you'll need for the whole shoot.
  
  
• Don't stop to check the display for every picture you take. It'll just slow you down, and you know how to compose a shot. Trust yourself.
  
  
• That white tape trick that geoffroi mentioned?* Priceless.
  
  
• Monopods are useless without some kind of pan/tilt head. Don't even bother using it again until you get one.
  
  
• Believe it or not, you actually have to underexpose shots anyway. Bright lights, virtually black background.
  
  
• Red lighting sucks for digital photos. Underexpose (and post-process) or wait it out.
  
  
• Microphones get in the way. Not much to be done about that except to make them useful and stick white tape on them.
  
  
• Earplugs are indispensable for any rock concert, but this goes double when the perfect shot you desperately need to take puts you 2 feet from the business end of a speaker stack.**
  

The concert was amazing. Disco and funk, with astounding vocals, and incredible performances all around, especially a truly kick-ass horn section. I likely would have attempted dancing, had the camera not been surgically attached to my hand. Much fun. Much fun, indeed.

220 photos. That's 1.25GB of discofunkaliciousness to post-process. This could take a while.

* That is, sticking white tape on surfaces (microphone stands, keyboards, etc.) so you can get an accurate white balance later, in post-processing.

** Etymotic ER-20 earplugs continue to rock my world.