This is more of an elab­o­ra­tion on a cou­ple of emails I’ve received from other pho­tog­ra­phers want­ing to know some tips for shoot­ing live music / bands. The fol­low­ing is by far only the tip of the ice­berg, but I’ll cover some basics that hope­fully you can gain some ideas from.

1. KNOW THE BAND
This is pretty much com­mon sense, the bet­ter you know the band your shoot­ing, the bet­ter you’ll be able to cap­ture them. You’ll be able to antic­i­pate how their show will go, and learn key expres­sions, moves, and pos­tures that you might have not known. Going on tour with the band is pos­si­bly one of the best ways of know­ing this, as it’s more than likely the set of songs and promi­nent events within the set of songs will be the same night after night. The only thing that will change will be the crowd and the venue.

You can learn a lot about the band you’ve got lined up by means of online media, YouTube, MySpace, Reverb­na­tion, or any web­sites they may have. See what other photographers/videographers have done and see how you can add some­thing new.

2. KNOW THE STAGE
Depend­ing on what kind of band you’re shoot­ing will deter­mine what kind of stage your deal­ing with — and more impor­tantly, what kind of light­ing you’ll be deal­ing with. Will you be in an inti­mate, dark set­ting with 150 drunk pun­ters throw­ing them­selves at each other right behind you? Or will you be in a photographer’s pit in an out­door set­ting with a bar­ri­cade brac­ing you from 5,000 peo­ple? These things will help gauge things like whether to use flash, and what lenses will work best.

3. FLASH FLASH FLASH
If you’re in a sit­u­a­tion where there is very lit­tle light­ing, and you can get nice and close to the band, using flash may become nec­es­sary.  Most cam­eras set on any kind of auto mode will have the flash pop up auto­mat­i­cally when con­fronted with a dark band set­ting. This is your cam­era telling you it’s too dark and this is the best option for you. Your cam­era is smart, but not that smart. First of all, get out of auto mode — man­ual is the way to go, or per­haps aper­ture or shut­ter priority.

To have any con­trol over your flash you’ll need to invest in a detach­able flash unit.  They allow you to do two things, have more grunt when you need it as you can con­trol how much flash to put in the mix, and you can get the flash off the cam­era. If your flash is stuck to your cam­era and you’re not bounc­ing (more on that later), you’ll find all the images will begin to look pretty flat. If the band is more than 4–5 meters away, turn the flash off. It will pro­vide very lit­tle effect, and any­thing that is lit will also look very flat.

If you jump on TradeMe or Ebay, you can find a sync cord that will con­nect from your hot­shoe on the top of your cam­era to the base of your flash, or even bet­ter, get a wire­less radio trig­ger. This means you can shoot with the cam­era in one hand, and the flash held at arms length to the left, right, above, wher­ever you like — the result will be an image that has con­trol and depth. Again, the closer you get to the band mem­ber, the more depth you can create.

Off camera flash

4. GLASS
Alter­na­tively from using flash, and often the bet­ter option is to utilise your lens and the light­ing avail­able. The main ele­ment of your equip­ment that will pro­duce a great photo is the piece of glass you put on the front of your cam­era. Focal length will be decided by the prox­im­ity between you and the band. If you’re up close or have access on the stage itself, a wide angle or fish­eye works a real treat to cap­ture dra­matic images with­out crop­ping off arms, gui­tars etc. You’ll also be able to cap­ture every­thing in con­text. If you’re at a larger event, a longer focal length might be required to get in close, like a 70-200mm tele lens.

When you’re not using a flash, the thing that will give your lens power in low light is how wide it will open up. The wider you can go, the more light will enter you cam­era, and the faster you can fire your shut­ter — avoid­ing motion blur. Gen­er­ally a 2.8 will cover most things, until you go to a small dark pub with no light­ing rig, then you’ll be grab­bing your flash again… unless you have a 50mm 1.8 or sim­i­lar. I use one of these all the time, and in dark sit­u­a­tions teamed with a lit­tle ISO lift, you can cap­ture images that you would have thought of get­ting with a reg­u­lar lens. And the best part is the Nikon or Canon ver­sions of these only cost about $200 new!

50mm f1.8, no flash

Keep tuned for the next part com­ing soon!