Noob question - concert photography

[matotaupa]

First of all I present myself: my name is Dan I live in Barcelona Spain.
Nice to meet you all.

I aquired this wonderful camera(panasonic fz28) not long time ago and I am still a noob in the photography field.

So I was yesterday to an AC/DC concert , I brought myy camera with me and I tried to do some pictures. 80% of them are blured.

How I did them? Put the cam on aperture mode, I tried to put the maximum aperture available that was mostly a 3.7-4 (at 18 zoom) and then shoot.

But then I switch to movie mode and boom, all focused a wonderful movie in HD 1080x720 (sound is crappy but doesn't matter)
In movie mode the camera focused well, no blurry things excepting when out of focus. All those at 18X zoom

Now it comes my question: If the camera did a good job in movie mode, then it was enough light to do also pictures, right? Is the same hardware so it must be like this no?

If so maybe you could give me some advice about what I do wrong.

Anyway I'll post a picture with Angus Young

Thank you all and best regards

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum.

I would suggest that your issue is not with the focus of the images, but that your shutter speed was too slow and thus the movement of the camera and the movement of the subjects are causing the blurry images. Even though you have set the maximum aperture, there was simply not enough light to get a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the movement.

You could have turned up the ISO setting, which probably would have helped, but also would have given you a lot of digital noise/grain.

 

[brysons]

To elaborate: It sounds to me like you were running into motion blur and camera shake (two good keywords to research), where the subject moves in the frame during the exposure. Camera shake is a particularly common problem with long focal length lenses (aka when you zoom in) and both are common with shutter speeds below 1/30 or so.

In a still, the idea is generally to freeze motion, so motion blur is undesirable. In a movie, you are capturing motion, so motion blur is actually something that you want in the individual frames. I would guess that if you look at the individual frames of your movie, each one exhibits similar blur to what you see in your still frames. With the aperture opened all the way up and the ISO cranked all the way up, there isn't much else you can do except stabilize the camera and try to time your shots when the subject is relatively still, or when motion blur is desirable.

To see what happens to a video if the shutter speed is too high (ie. the individual video frames do not show motion blur, see the video clip on this site (near the bottom) and read the grey box around it.
Canon Digital Learning Center - EOS 5D Mark II: How to Use Manual Video Exposure

Good luck shooting, performance venues are really difficult...