Photographing concerts

This is a slightly unusual topic for me: concert photography is something I’ve done quite a bit of, but never generally publicise because it falls out of my preferred commercial work. I started with being interested in the music first, in the mid 2000s; I shot a number of small venues locally, and these actually formed some of my earliest work – licensed to musicians and the like. Sadly, musicians are much like photographers: 99.99% of us are broke, but there are a small number of rockstars who make it into the big leagues. There are a few more who do okay and get by; we’re thankful we can sing for our supper and not drive a desk. That said, I have never (and will never) be on the other side of the microphone.

After a hiatus of a decade with a couple of relief points, I recently started again. Initially because a friend who owned a jazz club here in KL invited me to the club’s birthday party, and I happened to be in town and free that night. Being the place where I initially cut my teeth in exchange for unlimited martinis and a place to decompress from my day job, I packed a couple of cameras and headed out the door. After a few minutes of practice, I picked up the rhythm again.

Since posting a couple of those images elsewhere, I’ve received a number of emails asking for advice on shooting concerts – hence this post. The images are a selection of work from various eras in my career – you can probably tell by the change in style and watermark. Interestingly, I think there’s both not that much scope for individual style and more than you’d think – this sounds contradictory, but allow me to explain. Firstly, the lighting in all of these situations is fixed; there’s no way you’re going to be allowed to use a flash (or at least not for very long). You must make do with what you’ve got. In addition, unless you’re in a smaller venue or have all-access, your vantage points are going to be restricted, which in turn restricts your angles, compositions, spatial alignments, and perspectives that will work compositionally. At larger events, you may only get three or four songs from the pit, and absolutely zero stage access. In fact, these days, stage access has become increasingly rare – unsurprising as I’ve seen far too many ‘informal’ or ‘public’ events get mobbed on stage by amateur photographers completely blocking the musicians from the rest of the audience.

Here’s my checklist before shooting a concert.

Permits and access
If you’re going as an attendee, make sure photography is permitted beforehand. This sounds rather basic, but in recent times big name artists such as Taylor Swift have been doing all sorts of silly things to ‘protect their public image’ – the reality is that they’re also missing out on a lot of free press in the process. There are other artists who encourage sharing/recording/photography, and this makes sense philosophically: as an artist, you should support fellow artists if you want them to support you.

Smaller clubs and venues will usually permit photography, and there’s no harm in doing a barter of a few images for entry. I don’t normally encourage work-for-free (or close to it), but the reality is a lot of the smaller places really cannot afford to pay – and you’re getting free access and subject matter anyway. The supply-demand equation is fair, in that sense. Of course, how fair depends on how good a photographer you are. Midsize events may well permit access to certain areas that are off limits to the public if permission is gotten ahead of time.

Pre-reccie and rehearsals
If possible, visit the location during the rehearsal. This gives you a chance to gauge distances and angles, and areas you can access. Things are a lot more relaxed during rehearsals, so you will have a chance to talk to the artists, have them get comfortable with you (and possible score some work) and you with them. In addition, there are generally no access restrictions so you can get as close as you need to. At this point, the logical question would be ‘why not just shoot the rehearsal and forget the main event?’ – the simple answer is that the atmosphere just isn’t the same, and you of course won’t have any crowd elements.

Planning and previsualization
Knowing what you’re going to get will, allow you to plan your shot list both for comprehensiveness and so you can move around minimising disruption to the rest of the audience. I would suggest starting in one place and following a route rather than moving around (the exception is if you’re in a separate photographers’ pit, or the stage wings). Knowing what compositions are achievable with what focal lengths from which positions will mean you’re prepared and don’t miss critical moments. I’ll generally try to figure out the best places to put each band member in relation to background elements, lights and each other. That said, sometimes you have no choice because your position is fixed. Lastly, this sounds basic, but memorise the program so you know where to be, when. Be familiar with the music!

Lens choices
I usually go with a three prime lens setup. Firstly, you need as much light as you can get – especially in the smaller venues, where lighting is generally pretty dim. Secondly, performers move a lot: you’re going to need much higher shutter speeds than you think; high enough that the limiting factor is going to be motion of the subject, and not your hand shake. If you’re shooting slow enough that VR or IBIS is useful, then chances are either you’re making deliberate motion blur, or you might have caught the wrong moment: nothing exciting is happening. I’ll usually go with something wide/contextual that gets most of the stage in at a reasonable standoff distance, then something where I’ll get about a quarter of the stage – enough for two or three performers in context; lastly, something long to punch in for a tight shot. Depending on the size of the venue, this could range from 21/50/85 to 28/105/300 – or more. Zooms are more flexible, but you might run out of light. My current problem is the best performers in my usual range are all manual focus, with the exception of the Q – this means trap focusing and pulling focus with a burst. Live view is just too slow.

Camera choices
The obvious preference would be for something with strong high-ISO performance, fast AF, a high frame rate, and moderate resolution – this is the kind of thing the D4s and 1DX-class cameras excel at. More resolution is not necessarily a benefit because it means slower frame rates, slower writing, and above all, much more precision in focus and stability required. Elements are generally fairly low frequency (humans) or out of focus, so more resolution isn’t going to show a dramatic difference even under ideal circumstances. However, the reality is that you can use pretty much anything. I’ve shot concerts before with a fully manual film SLR and ISO 800 film; it can be done with care (and if you like results of a certain style)

Equipment setup
I find the all-or-nothing approach works best. Either the camera is set up in continuous tracking autofocus with spot meter linked to the focusing point, and you pick the performer’s face, let the camera do it’s thing and worry about composition and timing, or you go fully manual. The problem is, I’ve never found a camera that can reliably deal with erratic and energetic performers under lights of changing color*, or erratic exposure. So most of the time I find myself in full manual: keying my exposure to not clip anything and knowing I may have to do some recovery later – do not clip highlights, because this looks unnatural to our eyes; black shadows do not – and adjusting a stop or so as necessary. I’ll also disable auto-ISO because this uses the meter to determine what luminance level the output file should have. Lastly, manual focus: with an optical viewfinder. Live view is just too slow, with or without magnification and/or mirrors. The final trick to make manual focus workable is to pull focus whilst shooting a burst, at the highest frame rate you can. Remember: the subject is moving, so your chances of a hit are actually pretty high.

*DSLRs will frequently experience AF focus shift under tungsten light because the PDAF systems are generally calibrated for a single wavelength.

Shoot time: timing, gesture, light; being fluid
If what I’ve described previously sounds like a very masochistic way of shooting, it is; however, it’s also yielded the highest keeper rates for me. If you’ve seen one rehearsal, or a song, or know the music or the band’s style, then you’re more likely to know what happens next: which means being able to anticipate critical moments, prefocus at a certain point (e.g. the mic stand location) and know where the key passages or lyrics are. Though pulling focus plus bursts sounds a bit haphazard in terms of timing, these key moments typically last long enough for you to make it work, and anticipation makes it relatively easy to pre-frame correctly. Spontaneous action with a hyperactive band is different, and for that you just need AF and luck (or to know when and where it’s going to happen in advance). I admit I have little experience with this.

I’d also suggest framing a little bit looser than normal – say think of an 85 as a 105 – I won’t go so far as to call it cropping because the perspective shouldn’t fundamentally change, but the reality is it’s very, very difficult to be simultaneously aware of all the moving elements in the scene whilst focusing on the key performer. So leave yourself a bit of room to trim afterwards.

Lastly, as mentioned by Ken in the comments: hearing protection. Some sort of attenuating ear plugs are best, because you still want to hear what’s going on…

At last, we come to the whole objective of concert photography: for me, every frame has to have some sort of gesture or emotion or feeling – the music has to be in the image. The audience has to feel what you felt and heard; this means taking some time to listen and get a feel for the artist. Timing is critical: there must be some sort of gesture in every frame; facial expression, lip movement, hands, body language – all of these details are critical. Something as simple as a hand on an instrument can be a powerful frame, but only if the hand gesture is the correct one (preferably with a decisive finger shape and some tension or action). In good production design, the lights, effects and props are complimentary to the music; the whole show comes together as greater than the sum of its parts. Our challenge is to encapsulate that in an image. The good news is that somebody has already thought out the lighting for us, and it’s isolating the subject already. The bad news is we have no flexibility, and the performer may well improvise.

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I’ve always felt that to a large extent the music and production design dictate the style of the presentation; to a much larger extent than say a freely posed portrait. In essence, it’s a posed portrait in which you can’t move the subject and the lights have been set up for you – you can only move yourself, and if you deviate too far from the initial set design, then there’s a visible disconnect betweens the mood of the image and the mood of the performance and music. For example, my own speciality is jazz concerts. Our expectations of jazz photography have been influenced by decades of photography in dim clubs where high speed film in monochrome was really the only option; however such images also don’t work so well in color. I suspect it’s because monochrome is a better medium to convey the melancholy or ‘hard’ passages – and so has stood the test of time. I need to challenge myself and challenge that too, I think.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: remember to enjoy the music! MT

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