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.