Concert Photography (photo intensive)

[fokker]

I often use flash for band photography. Just like with everything else, there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way. Flash overpowering the ambient is the wrong way. Flash supplementing ambient could have turned some of these into great shots. Stage lighting is weird in a few ways. One, it's not designed for photography. Two, it's not designed to see accurate colors. There are a lot of wavelengths that are missing and a subject that is illuminated by a light source with missing wavelengths means that some colors won't show up at all. You can see that happening in several of these shots. Like Derrel said, some are solid. Those were also brightly lit. You were at ISO 800, f/2.8 and still getting 1/640th of a second. That's a pretty bright performance. The ones that suffer were the ISO 2000, 2.8, at 1/200th of a second.

In any case, there is an art to balancing flash with ambient, ensuring the direction of the light looks natural, and ensuring the color of the light blends well, but just because it's not as easy as pointing and clicking, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

Like you said, you were just part of the crowd this year, and all things considered, I think you did a pretty nice job. The performances that were well lit look great. The ones that weren't, well, there are some color balance issues, some focus issues, and some contrast issues.

Overall, nicely done.

A lot of truth in this post ^^

Personally, I always use flash for concerts if I can (if it doesn't piss off the artists too much). Like Kerbouchard said, there's a right way and a wrong way. The right way is to still crank the ISO and shoot wide open (or close to it) so you get a large portion, say 70%, of the light on the subject from ambient/stage lighting and the flash (on camera in ETTL mode) just fills in the shadows, brings the exposure up to 'normal', and prevents you blowing out any one colour channel. It's been a while since I shot a concert, but here's an example from one of the most recent ones I did:

The last concert I was at which was a mate's band had such poor lighting and I had neglected to bring my speedlight, I was shooting at 12,500 ISO, f/1.4 and 1/30s. Needless to say I didn't get many keepers from that gig!

 

[FilmaTroy]

Using flash during a concert as a professional and being in the "photo pit" is prohibited at all times. unless its a little whole in the wall venue.

 

[PatrickJamesYu]

The girl in the first one is soo metal. haha

Good shots, I like them.

 

[pixilstudio]

Lighting always sucks at shows. I usually have to use a flash, and then shot in B&W so it doesn't look like crap.

if you get a press pass you can never use flash... and you only get to shoot for the first 3 songs
here are mine from concerts past.... sorry hope you like wycleff Music Photography