A photographer is me!

[mangosteen]

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.

Comments

[lillilah]

Oh, I wish I had had a faster lens when I tried concert photos. Fast film just doesn't cut it.

[passionandsoul.livejournal.com]

I am so going to steal that white tape trick for othe projects- thanks!

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

Red lighting sucks for digital photos. Underexpose (and post-process) or wait it out.

In my experience shooting photos for my lighting design porfolio in anything from low light to full bright theatrical lighting, I have found two quick solutions for this:

You can either seriously underexpose or use a grey filter.

-or-

You can get someone who does theater and TV lighting to buy you some color corrective gel for the right parts of the spectrum and you can tape that pver the lens for the red shots. (It does mean correcting the skin tones a little because they become a bit green or yellow depending on the rest of the lighting used. But this is easier to correct for than the major correction and loss of detail experienced without the filter.)

If you want, I'll show you the resulting photos from this technique. I have gotten sucessful shots with both techniques in low light and full bright. I have a couple really excellent examples from some dance and theater-in-the-round work I did a couple years ago. Let me see if I can get them scanned or you can just drop by sometime since I live less than a mile from you!

[sunspiral.livejournal.com]

The newer iterations of Photoshop have the digital equivalent of lens gels that can be applied after the fact, too.

[arfur]

[...] post-processing.

That's where I fall down, actually, with digital: I've got all these shots, but never get around to processing more than a quarter of them.

It'd probably help if I had a photo printer. Or else got a ritual down of using the CVS photo processing coupons.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

When you have a minute...might you be able to send the pics from our BBQ? We'd like to put them all in one place.

Thanks, bubela.

[geoffroi.livejournal.com]

I'll agree to disagree with you on the ball head/monopod thing. Never had one, never felt the need (assuming your lens has a rotating tripod mount, which any lens big enough to require a monopod should).

Oh, and I'll see your 220 photos and raise you to 1795 (and almost 20G between raw and JPG files) from f+ days at Falcon Ridge....

Watching the histogram on the LCD display out of the corner of your eye is the most useful part of the display. You can see right away if you've blown the exposure....

[fieldsnyc.livejournal.com]

There's nothing like an expodisc for really nailing the white balance. Even white tape comes in various temperatures of white.

Also, CS2 has some truly outstanding tools for auto-processing raw files. While it lacks the artistic vision of going over them one by one, it's FAR FAR better than not processing them at all, and gives better-than-decent results for a first pass for most images.

And, finally - I somewhat disagree on the fast lens. Shooting wide open is going to give you a REALLY narrow depth of field. In some cases that'll be what you want, but you're going to blur out a lot of detail in the background that way. IS lens, moderate ISO, underexpose a bit, and above all - shoot raw. Those extra 4 bits of dynamic range are going to help you a lot when you're cranking the exposure.

[mangosteen]

Shoot raw: Yup, did that.

Moderate ISO: Check. (400-800)

Underexpose a bit: Check. Going back through the EXIF info, there were actually not all that many times I shot at f/1.8

Expodisc: Huh. That's pretty clever. The lighting conditions were changing a bit too fast to be taking 2 shots for every one, but I'd definitely have to think about it.

IS lens: Someday when I have money.

Photoshop CS2: Ditto, although the educational discount is powerful mojo, so I'll have to consider that, too. Digital photography means that even amateurs have to figure out workflow.

[fieldsnyc.livejournal.com]

Yeah, dynamic lighting conditions are tricky and the white tape trick is a good one. You could probably use the expodisc to calibrate the white level of the white tape, then key off of that for the subsequent shots. Note, also, that you can use the expodisc frames for calibration in photoshop after the fact if you can match the lighting - they don't necessarily need to be taken before.

Another plug for CS2 - it may just be that my photoshop skills have actually finally intersected with the feature set, but it's simply unlike anything I've ever worked with before in sheer power for getting to my vision quickly.

For example - this photo of a cocktail glass was always just wrong before (taken in 2004) - the shadows were off, the shades of red on the berries were off, and the whole overall look was just flat. I recently went back and tackled it with the new tools. It only took me about 15 minutes to get it looking the way I wanted.