Lighting Musing

Wow, the first post of 2009 comes in February, which makes me feel a bit sad that I’ve gone a whole month without yapping on here.  I’ve recently decided to start looking at some lighting solutions because let’s face it, without light the photographer is lost.  But those who are familiar with my work will know that I prefer to work with available light and fast lenses, whether it be portraiture or music photography, day light and available light have been where my love has been.  There’s nothing quite as spectacular as a portrait taken when the daylight is diffused in just the right way, at the correct angle to make (or exceed) the image you have in your mind.

But two of my favourite photographers also use additional light to create a mood and an effect that blows me away frequently, one I have mentioned in this blog several time, Damien Lovegrove, who has gone from strength to strength in his commercial career and now authors DVD’s, speaks at professional conferences, writes for magazines, the list is endless.  The other sadly died in 2002, Yousuf Karsh is generally heralded by some of the top portrait photographers as a leader in the field, his work had so much depth and often created an image that epitomises the subject’s inner personality (Yousuf was quoted many times that this was because his interest always was in the personality rather than the image itself!).  The one thing that both of these great photographers have in common is a background in stage lighting, Damien at BBC Television, and Yousuf experienced and experimented in a theatre environment.

Now Damien is proof that he loves to experiment with lighting, Yousuf was amazed at the possibilities using incandescent lighting, so I’m now looking at my options to take the plunge in to the mystical realms of lighting.  I’ve started doing research and have decided that although more expensive, the freedom offered by a mobile solution like Elinchrom’s Ranger line or Broncolor Mobilite seem to be the way to go to give freedom.

Once I’ve made a choice and started experimenting, I’ll be posting some images for critique, but in the meantime, if anyone has any good resources for lighting knowledge and information, I’ll gladly accept it, since entering the world of photographic lighting feels like the first time I picked up a camera and wondered what difference changing the F-stop made?  It’s quite overwhelming.

One last thing, if you’re not familiar with Yousuf Karsh’ work you can find him right here:  http://karsh.org

Cheers…..

Bits and Banding and Greytones

Don’t you think it’s funny how we spend so long lusting after new technology, only to find that when it arrives we actually wanted something else, or something old in the new.  Organically Farmed Food, CD’s with the warmth of Vinyl, Valve based guitar amplifiers, Classic Cars, vintage handmade musical instruments, the list goes on and on.

And so I find myself in a similar dilemma, I love the convenience of digital photography, the unsurpassed flexibility, the opportunity to develop my negatives without the mess and stink of chemicals, and yet I mourn the loss of the feel of film, especially in the case of Black and White images, sure we have fantastic resolution (MegaPixels) available to us now, certainly on par with film at the upper end of the market, but I’m talking about tones in particular the specatcular range of greytones and subtle variances in an old print (or I could just be going mad??)

As I understand it (correct me if I’m wrong), the limiting factor is the A/D conversion process, the way the camera interprets what it sees (analogue) and converts that to negative (digital), and the more digital bits that are involved in the conversion process the less obvious the trasition between tones and shades.  Canon have recently introduced 14bit DIGIC conversion on their latest camera models (EOS 5D Mk2, EOS 1Ds Mk3) to give less banding (harsh steps between shades and colours).

If anyone can point me at any examples of B&W images taken with either of these cameras, I’d be really keen to take a look at the images produced and to see if these are starting to regain the feel of subtlty of tones that I seem to pick up from Film and Print that seem to be lacking (to me at least) within Digital B&W images.

Of course if I’m talking garbage, feel free to pipe up and tell me, it maybe that it’s all in my head!!

Concert Photography Part 1b – Bodies

The Body

So, what about the camera body?? Use the one you have until you can buy the one you want. Ideally the body you use will be relatively modern (if it’s a DSLR) because the newer the technology, and the higher the quality body, generally the less noise your sensor will give. Your camera should be able to manage working at 1600 ISO or higher (3200 ISO ideally), which is why I said the technology should be as new as possible, older technology sensors have significantly more noise than those of newer bodies. The important thing to remember is it’s not always about price and cost, after long deliberation, I eventually opted for the EOS5D over the more expensive professional models simply because the 5D generated less digital noise than any of the other models available at the time, an you’ll probably find yourself wanting to lift the exposure on a shot quite frequently in post processing, which is where digital noise really shows. The noise generated by my EOS 20D at ISO 3200, is far worse than when the same settings are used on my EOS 5D, and less noise makes for a cleaner image. Ideally, the body should have spot metering, and at the very least partial metering (sometimes I prefer partial over spot, I’ll discuss more in the piece on technique). The frames per second isn’t an issue for me, because I often know what shot I’m looking for based on the mood of the gig at that point in time and fire off 2 or 3 shots to get the shot. Others I’ve worked with, use high frames per second, and blow through a memory card every 5 minutes. It’s down to personal style. In camera metering systems that you’ll be working with are all quite different from brand to brand and even in some cases from camera to camera, the more you live with it, the better you’ll come to know it, I’d like to say you can use your light meter, but as you know the reality is that the pre-gig lighting is normally quite low and the lights are enormously changeable and most of the time you’ll be working too intensly to have the luxury of time to even think about pulling out a light meter, best to leave it at home… less to carry .

What about the quantity of bodies?? Well I work with two sometimes, and other times that’s just overkill. As an example, when working Wembley or another large venue, you almost certainly want two bodies, you want the close-ups and you want the wides, and because you may only have 2 songs in which you can get your shots, time is of the essence. This means no time to change lenses, two bodies, one with a 16-35mm or 24-70mm another body with 70-200mm or similar, and swap around as you need. For smaller more intimate venues, or places where perhaps the stage isn’t quite so elevated, or you have plenty of time to change lenses, one body would suffice. Again more discussion of this in my piece on technique. The bodies I use are a Canon EOS20D and an EOS 5D. That’s where I’ll leave it for the moment, the next article up will be part 2 – Technique. Hopefully this has been useful to people, I’ll probably add to this article based on peoples feedback and if I remember anything I forgot to add in when I wrote it originally.

Concert Photography – Part 1a – Lenses

Welcome to the first part of my concert photography articles. As explained previously, I don’t claim to be an expert or more knowledgeable than anyone else particularly, I’m simply passing on some of my experiences. This first article is going to deal with equipment as I see it, what works what doesn’t work, and everything in between. This article is going to assume you have a DSLR, although you can use a film SLR, and people did for years, there are reasons, which I’ll cover in this article and the article on technique, why DSLR is potentially a better tool for this particular job.

Lenses

The first thing to remember about shooting live gigs is that the lighting is different at every gig you go to, it’s never the same amount of light twice, but one thing you can be sure of, and that is that there is never ever enough light. With that in mind if you’re looking to cover this stuff, I recommend as fast a lens as you can afford, ideally f2.8 or faster. OK , so fast lenses aren’t cheap, I get that, but really, other than gaining access to gigs, which I’ll cover in a later article, a fast lens is your biggest obstacle to making a good go of shooting gigs. That doesn’t mean that you have to buy the most expensive lens you can find (although if you can afford to without breaking the bank you’ll be glad you did), Canon and Nikon make a fine range of fast lenses but they come at a premium price, Sigma and other third party manufacturers are likely to make some great lenses for your camera too!! I have friends who use the Sigma 70-200 f2.8 with great success and the retail price on it is almost 50% less than those of the aforementioned brands. The reason they’re so expensive is because the more light a lens has to gather, the larger the elements and the more scope for something causing a defect with the final image. The good news is that most lenses engineered to be this fast also tend to be engineered to professional (or near professional standards) which means that they can take a lickin and keep on tickin!! As you start to shoot more popular gigs you’ll find this really important (15 or 20 photographers in a 6ft wide space across the width of the stage all running around for the shot and trying not to get in each others way) as you’re bound to bang the camera occasionally.

Keeping all of the above in mind, the next question is; Prime or Zoom? This really is a matter of personal choice and technique. On one side prime lenses are lighter, generally cheaper, and almost always faster pound for pound. As an example, if you always get great access to a venue and often find yourself quite close to the stage, then you might be able to work with something like the Canon 135mm f2 (assuming you have a Canon) or similar, a very fast lens, certainly lighter than a fast zoom. The downside is that you trade weight for the flexibility that you get with a zoom lens. My personal preference is to work with fast zooms, always, since there’s very little planning that can be done as to where you get to shoot from at a gig, I find it best to have the zoom and be able to cover most situations. My personal choice (I’m a Canon user) is to use two lenses for my gigs, a Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8 L-IS and a Canon 16-35mm f2.8L, these aren’t necessarily the best tools for the job, they’re just what happens to work for me and my style of photography. One last thing to know is if you get a lense with image stabilization (IS for Canon, VR for Nikon) it has a gyroscopic style mechanism that helps to prevent motion blur caused by not being able to hold the camera still enough. I know people that can hold hand hold a camera using 1/60 shutter speed, but not everyone can. Image Stabilization will help to make lower hand holding speeds without camera shake a possibility, Nikon claim up to 4 stops on some of their literature, but either way it helps (as always with a price premium!). I’ll cover shutter speeds, etc in my technique article.

So, I hear you asking, if there’s not much light, why not make your own light and bring along a good flash? Good question, well most larger venues and even mid-sized theaters have a strictly no flash policy, which is either in place at the request of the artist/bands management or a standard policy of the venue, wither way, get used to not using a flash, I can guarantee as you start out at the smaller venues, 80% of places won’t allow it, and as you start working the bigger venues, you’ll find the flash simply acting as dead weight that you carry around (unless you’re shooting something else while you’re there), but I’ll probably cover this more under etiquette.

That’s all for this article, I originally started to write about bodies in this post, but the post was becoming too long and unwieldy for a blog post. I’ll finish writing the rest of this and post it in thenext day or two. I hope someone finds this article useful, if you do, leave a comment. If you don’t, then let me know why, leave a comment. Something I could of done better? Something I got wrong or is inaccurate? Let me know, leave a comment. Cheers for now.

Tips on Concert Photography – An Introduction

Whilst I’m happy to claim that I’m not the number one concert photographer on the planet, whilst I’ve been shooting live gigs, I’m happy to pass on some tips to those looking to start out doing this. Mostly because I’ve recently found myself getting annoyed at newcomers to the area in much the same way that people got angry at me when I started. There are a few good articles on the web, but most are relatively outdated or largely irrelevant, many focus from the perspective of shooting with traditional film, it’s not that I’m anti-film, but in the arena of concert photography (especially when working to deadlines), digital is king, as I’ll explain in this post. All tips in this post are a combination of my experience, others words of wisdom and common sense, it’s not meant to be definitive, so if I’m wrong on something post a comment and put me straight, so others can read it too!

I’ll be splitting this up in to four parts, because in my opinion, there are four equal parts to concert photography. Part 1 will deal with hardware, and equipment, Part 2 will deal with technique, Part 3 will deal with etiquette (perhaps the most important and least addressed part of the big picture), Part 4 will deal with getting access (which also includes a bit on who gets the finished images). I like to go into detail, so I’ll try and post a part every few days, depending on my work load.

These articles will not cover photoshopping or manipulation, because everyone is different, and all magazines have a different feel to them, so each brief or commission needs to be treated differently.  It doesn’t go into how much to charge once you’ve got some experience, that’s entirely personal. And I don’t cover many legal aspects, but I will touch on a few items that are important to know about (I’m not a lawyer, so any legal stuff I talk about needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, in other words, I’m bringing your attention to something, not giving you a legal opinion, go see a lawyer if you want clarification.  Last but not least, I disclaim any bad stuff that may happen to you as a direct result of taking my advice most people don’t listen to me 99% of the time, I’ve got no reason to expect them to start now!!

Watch this space. Part 1 should be along in a few days.

New Ultra Zoom Lens from Sigma

Was reading Rob Galbraith’s feed today and there’s a story about Sigma releasing a new 200-500 f2.8, no specs yet, and no prices, but I’m unaware of anything else out there like this that I can use at this time.  I’m keen to see the pricing, I probably can’t justify it, but you never know

Apple CrackBook Pro

I’ve had my new laptop for a month or two now, and I can confirm it’s quite addictive. I’m not new to Macs but this is the first Apple laptop I’ve had, and it’s great. It’s fast, and along with Parallels VM, it runs Windows XP every bit as quickly as my old Vaio did, result!

I have a minor whinge though. Firstly damn it gets hot, damn hot, in fact I’ve never had a laptop get this hot ever before (someone said something about it being 80 watts, is this a lot for a laptop?).

Anyway, I’m not gonna go on for ages, everything about them has pretty much already been saids probably hundreds of times, I’ll simply say, I can highly recommend them. Go on, spoil yourself

Full On Full Frame 5D

I finally bit the bullet, I couldn’t resist the draw of going back to a full frame camera, so I went and bought the EOS 5D. Athough I’ve only had it a few days I’ve gotta say it’s has everything that I thought the 20D was missing, including a much nicer sounding shutter, and whislt to many this might sound trivial, there are many times when working a quiet room where the smooth clishhhhhick draws much less attention than the 20D’s CLACKETYCLACK.

The viewfinder is brighter and the LCD clearer, but you’ve read it in a thousand other reviews so I’m not gonna do the broken record. Suffice to say any images posted from here on out will almost certainly be from a Canon EOS 5D.

Pictures and Pixels

Soon, I’m not certain exactly when, but sometime in the reasonbly near future, there will come a time when Digital Camera CCD (CMOS, or whatever other technology is coming down the road) will be sufficient to capture film like resolution and detail with ease and relatively low cost. Shortly after this time large CCD’s (or whatever) will be cheaper and more reliable to manufacture in the same way we’ve seen from CPU fabricators. I will welcome this day with relish, because we can all get back to the fundamentals of creating great images, practicing our technique and worring about aspects of our image making other than if we have a good enough resolution to go to A3.

Right now, I need a camera with better resolution, but cannot bring myself to go back to using film. I look forward to the future with interest, to see what it holds for us, but most of all I look forward to going back to creating images, where the resolution of your images was a minor worry, not a major one.