How To Take... Concert Photography

Novice photographers are often disappointed with the shots they get from their cameras at concerts and other low-light situations. This is usually due to the fact that, if left to it's own devices, the camera will decide what ISO speed to use, and can also insist on using on-camera flash.

If you're at a concert, using flash can be enough to get you thrown out of the venue (to say nothing of it being pretty rude going off in the artists' faces). It also results in very harsh, flat lighting, which completely drowns out any of the colourful stage lighting, ruining the atmosphere.

In order to capture the colours to full advantage, turn your camera to manual - or at least, alter the ISO-setting to the highest it will go - 800 or 1600 if possible, and turn off the flash. This should force the camera to choose a wide aperture and fastest shutter speed possible, which will help capture the colours and action on stage.

[The Rumble Strips - stage lighting effects are good to capture with the wide angle lens]

Venue:

Alexandra Palace, for a private gig by The Rumble Strips. Because it was a private show, photography was allowed, but this isn't always the case at concerts. I was right in the front row, so no-one's head was in my way!

Equipment:

• Canon EOS 30D set on ISO 1600 and Programme AE
• Canon 17-85mm f4-5.6 EF IS lens for wide shots
• Canon 75-300mm f4-5.6 EF IS lens for closeups/portraits

Portraits:

Try to get the musicians "doing something" or at least, appear to be in the middle of singing!

[Tom Garbutt on bass, with a green spotlight picking out some highlights]

[Henry Clark on trumpet, with a magenta spotlight backlighting]

If you can, try and fill the frame for some interesting shots of the instruments:

[Closeup of the poor old battered guitar Charlie was strumming]

It's always good to be right at the front of the crowd, to get the best pictures. And if you can turn off you flash and wind up the ISO sensitivity of your camera, you're likely to get more interesting pictures than the bloke next to you holding up a camera phone!

Taking A Dim View

We're approaching the shortest day of the year, and so the dark days of winter are well and truely upon us. However, providing you get a bit of sun, winter is often a great time for photography. The low light and long shadows can produce amazing views from the most mundane of subjects.

This was taken on Tower Bridge on Sunday, during a photographic day out with some friends. I had to wait for a bit to make sure there were no random roaming tourists in the shot, but I quite like the overall effect. You can see more mono shots from the day in my Mono Selection 4 Gallery.

If you've never been, take the opportunity to go to the Tower Bridge Exhibition - for just over a fiver you get to go up to the two high-level walkways above the bridge and see the Victorian pumping engines which were used to elevate the road decks when it was first built.

We were pretty jammy with the weather on Sunday, bearing in mind that we'd picked the date well in advance and it had been chucking with rain for most of the previous week. Here's a view from the walkways, looking towards the Isle of Dogs:

The original idea for going out on a trip was to visit the Volume exhibition at the V&A, billed as an interactive sound and light show. We thought dusk would be a good time to hit the show, before all the colour has gone out of the sky. The exhibit itself was slightly disappointing, in that it was mute for our visit - no music at all, no matter how hard you flapped your arms! But I was quite pleased with the pictures I managed to get - this is one of the last I took:

My EOS300D isn't bad in low-light conditions, especially when you wind the ISO setting up to 1600. I was also using my Canon 17-85mm IS [Image Stabilised] lens, which means you can hand-hold shots down to 1/15s or sometimes slower, without everything going blurred. Other folks in my group were using a tripod, which the V&A staff seemed not to mind (you have to be careful where you use a tripod these days) when we were outside. I rarely use a tripod (but do take a monopod with me to the rugby, to support my stupidly-heavy Sigma 135-400mm "pap" lens). It's just me being lazy, but I seem to work better that way. You can see more colour images from our day out in my General Colour - 9 Gallery.

If you only have access to a compact camera, it doesn't necessarily mean you will get bad pictures in low light, but you do need to be able to take some control of the camera, rather than just leaving it to get on with it. If you can, select the highest ISO rating the camera will cope with. Turn off the flash. Try and point the focus/exposure centre spot not at the brightest thing in the scene (you will end up with a very dark image) but at some mid-tones. This way, you should get a reasonable balance to the exposure. Shutter speeds are likely to be quite slow, so any way of supporting the camera is a good idea - tripod, monopod, brace against a wall/lamp-post/friend's shoulder. And don't breathe in while you press the shutter!

Here's a few more low-light and festive images I took this time last year.