Live photography

Slightly more appreciated than other posts are those with concert photos and also the ones with tips on "how to", so I'll be doing a few more of the later. Concert photos I have an abundance of and will of course post loads of them, one at a time.

Shooting at concerts do present you with a slightly less controlled environment than most other situations, there's a lot going on up on the stage with lights, smoke and pyro not to mention the artists not exactly being still. Setting the camera right will help you a lot along the way.

Start by setting the camera to Manual, but leave the continous autofocus in place. Also set the camera to continous rather than single shots, it's better to get a lot of frames to choose from and having the ability to just scrap the ones that are no good. Since the people you're photographing move around you will most likely get more than a few shots with motion blur.

Next you set the ISO, 400 ASA is usually a good place to start and if needed you can go higher. Don't go too high though as with a higher ISO comes more grainy images. Now set the the aperture to f/3.2, this should give you a nice depth of field. If your images become to dark or too bright you may need to adjust this though.

One problem with shooting a concert is that there will a lot of changing lights with different colors and this can throw the automatic white balance off so set the camera white balance manually to 2.500 kelvin.

Since the motif is moving around quite a bit on a stage, especially at rock concerts, you need a low shutter speed to avoid motion blur, generally 1/250 or 1/500 of a second should do the trick.

Hopefully this little item with tips on how to set your camera will be of use, happy shooting!