Concert Photography

[amarine88]

I finally managed to get passes backstage to Warped Tour so I'm going to be able to shoot it. I have shot concerts before, but with a point and shoot camera because I wasn't able to bring in my DSLR. I cam going to be able to bring it and a lense or two to Warped Tour this Sunday and am wondering if you guys have any advice. What lenses should i bring? What f stop and shutter do u recommend? Any other advice you have for shooting live shows would be great!

I have some shots from a couple of the things i have shot on my flickr.

 

[im_trying11]

dont go in a mosh pit

 

[amarine88]

dont go in a mosh pit

haha i am actually bringing a ton of padding and multiple cases. I want to get some shots WHILE crowd surfing

 

[im_trying11]

good luck with that

 

[flipsidestudio]

haha i am actually bringing a ton of padding and multiple cases. I want to get some shots WHILE crowd surfing

I hope you have insurance on your equipment.

Seriously, that's a good way for things to get broken. I don't know how late you're going to be there or be shooting but you may want to bring a good external flash.

 

[JHF Photography]

What lenses should i bring? What f stop and shutter do u recommend? Any other advice you have for shooting live shows would be great!

What lenses do you have? Is it an indoor concert, outdoor concert, daytime or night time? How close/far away from the stage will you be? Where will you be shooting from? This info would really help answer your questions.

I'm going to assume for now that it's an indoor show, which means it will be dark in there except for stage lights. If that's the case, you're going to want a fast lens, the wider the aperture the better. I shoot any indoor shows with a 50mm 1.8, and I try keeping around 2.2 to allow a bit more depth of field. That should give you a reasonable shutter speed for handholding the shot and freezing the action, depending on the lighting.

If you have a fast zoom, that would be handy, but zooms less than 2.8 probably won't be much use.

I wouldn't recommend a flash..... it tends to kill the mood of the lighting. I only use my flash unit if the lighting is to dark to work with (generally very small club venues).


Hope this helps.

 

[ksmattfish]

What lenses should i bring?

My favorites are a wide zoom, and a fast, normal prime. I only shoot in bars and small venues so I'm usually within 10' of my subjects. When I'm shooting bands I carry a Canon 5D with a Tamron 17-35 f/2.8-4 and a Canon 50mm f/1.4.

What f stop and shutter do u recommend?

Whatever you can get away with. I'm often shooting at 1/15th, and with the aperture wide open or stopped down 1/3rd.

Any other advice you have for shooting live shows would be great!

I like raw for easy color noise reduction and white balance adjustment.

I find (with Canon DSLRs) I get less noise increasing the ISO and making sure the exposure is good than using a slower ISO and underexposing. That said don't be afraid to crank the ISO all the way up and under expose if you have to. Sometimes it's just dark, and it's either under expose or skip the shot. If you get excellent emotion, action, and angle of view most folks won't complain about the noise.

Check out my live music photography from this year at http://www.henrypeach.com/gallery/index.php?cat=4

 

[amarine88]

luckily its an outdoor day show. I'm not sure how close I will be getting. I have a backstage pass but because I dont work for any official press I can't get a press pass. I am going to try to get into the photo pit.

Thanks for all the advice so far and keep it coming if you have any more tips on composition and such.

 

[JerryPH]

Outdoor or indoor it will not make a difference. Last Saturday (Aug 9), I was talked into going to get some pics for my niece at an outdoor concert/fair/air balloon event... man, I tell you, I almost had fun (ok certain things aside, it was fun!).

Besides the pick-pocket attempt, and later the teen's hand that I caught trying to get into my backpack (almost broke his hand then and there, he was hauled off by his friends crying like a baby), the constant pushing and shoving and finally the 200 decible screams of wildly excited girls that usually end up being 3 inches from your ears, you can have a good time... maybe.

Right now, I can guarantee you that a P&S is going to get you MAYBE a 1 in 200 chance of a clear picture. From all the pictures that I saw of people beside and around me, thats a fair estimate. These events are just either too far, too dark and too fast for an average P&S to get anything meaningful.

I had the D200 and 70-200 lens, and to be honest, I thought I would have trouble, but I found people unusually respectful of my equipment and the biggest issue I had was to stop getting tired from carrying it around and being pushed just as I took the pic, over and over.

If you want half reasonable pics, nothing short of a dSLR and a long lens is going to cut it. The event that I was at was on the South Shore or Montreal in a town called St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu and the bands there were Creature, Hedley and Tokio Hotel:

From the group Creature:

From the group Hedley:

Bill, lead singer of Tokio Hotel:

Wear comfortable shoes, be rested before as I felt like I ran a marathon after standing there for 4-5 hours!

Edit: I wondered what a mosh pit was... but it became apparent as soon as I saw it... hilarious.


As for settings... you are going to need a camera that has low noise at higher ISO and a fast lens (F/2.8 or numerically lower). Average settings for the pics I have above are ISO between 800-1250 (I should have gone to ISO 1600!), aperture at F/2.8. There is no "one good" setting. Your dSLR will tell you what you need to get the proper exposure. Flashes during the concert are normally NOT allowed, but since one is normally over 50 feet away from the subjects, they are all but useless anyways (I do not know what they will allow backstage, though!).

Bring plenty of storage (enough for several hundred pictures) and extra batteries if you have them. In one very long day, I went through two 8GB cards and three batteries. Finally... get there EARLY and find a good spot to shoot from.

 

[amarine88]

THANK YOU! That last long post was very helpful!

I am shooting with a low-end pentax dslr. Its a great camera for a starting one, but i never get anything below f/4 and with my only decent zoom lense dont get below f/5 but you work with what you got The concert is this sunday so wish me luck! I'll post pics after.

(i hope the backstage pass i got is real)

 

[epatsellis]

If you have a longer, fastish lens, bring it. My typical concert shooting outfit is:

300 f4 EDIF-AF on F4
180 f2.8 on F3
135 f2 on F3 (alternating with a 35-105 at times)

While a 300 sounds longish, it lets you get shots like this from a reasonable distance:

 

[JerryPH]

That300mm at F/4 is definitely good enough for day shots, but it's going to be hard to get down to a shutter speed that is fast enough at those zoom levels to avoid motion blur at a fast moving concerts, unless you can really jack up the ISO to at least 1600 or more at night... of course by then most dSLRs have some pretty serious noise issues to contend with. You could always try cropping to get in closer...

Like this, perhaps?:

Though these shots display the character of the performers, I think I prefer shots that are a little wider that let me display the dynamics of what is happening on the stage. This is something hard to do at 300mm without a nice tripod or monopod... or some really fantastic hand-holding technique (thats just beyond me... lol).

I don't know, maybe I am off. This was after all, my first time in this kind of an event with a camera, and I was more blown away by being there than concentrating on doing my best with my equipment.

​

 

[John_Olexa]

I have never shot a concert where flash was allowed.
So I use the highest ISO & shoot Wide open. I carry a few lenses but use mostly by 70-200 2.8

Lee Ann Wolmack

Keith Urban

 

[RyanLilly]

Warped tour, sweet! I haven't been to warped tour in years, but For anyone that's wondering, its big. At least 3 stages, usually 2 main stages that alternate between bands, and one ore two side stages for smaller acts, this thing is probably always outdoors, and goes on starting around noon(I think), and goes into the night till 11 or 12,

The main stages are pretty big, so a longer lens will be useful, during the day slower glass will be fine, at night with stage lighting a monopod or bracing yourself/camera against things will probably be nessisary, but you should be able to get some nice shots. Pretty much just set you ISO to its highest, you will get more keepers, even though they have noise.

Even very slow shutter speeds can usually freeze motion well enough for concerts and can look very cool especially if there is fog, smoke or haze, your main problem will be camera shake. Bring a lot of memory and expect your keeper rate to be lower than you normal.

 

[JerryPH]

I have never shot a concert where flash was allowed.
So I use the highest ISO & shoot Wide open. I carry a few lenses but use mostly by 70-200 2.8

Lee Ann Wolmack

I'm not into country at all, but I love Lee Ann Womack! Woot! Woot!

The Nikkor 70-200 F/2.8 VR did me good too... best $1600 I ever spent. As far as shutter speeds, maybe it was me, but I was hard-pressed to get motion-blur free pics at anything under 1/125th under the conditions that I went through last weekend. My keeper rate was WAY lower, like Ryan said.