Bristol has a well-supported live music scene with many small venues putting on local and touring acts. The small venues are generally fine about allowing photography so it’s a great way to capture memorable images of up and coming bands.
Generally, unobtrusive photography is fine at small venues so you won’t need a press pass or special permission. Sadly, the best small venues are incredibly gloomy so dazzling ‘concert photography’ is not going to be possible. A sub-f2 prime lens or two is ideal for dingy gig photography. I usually go with a ‘plastic fantastic’ Canon 50mm 1.8 and 85mm 1.8 and a Canon DSLR. Two cameras can also help so you can have a wider lens and a longer lens for tighter crops, especially if it’s an elbow-crowded venue where it’s hard to move around freely
For gigs I shoot manual mode, or sometimes aperture priority where the lighting is more straightforward. I tend to be at around a shutter speed of around 1/160, a little more if I can get it, as that’s fast enough to just about freeze motion but slow enough to make a good exposure possible at high ISO.
The Liftmen at the Fleece, Bristol. At medium sized venues the lighting is usually pretty good and gives you many more options than small pub gigs.
Motion-blurred photographs a 1/50 or less are ruined shots to my eyes. I’ll usually spot meter the performer’s face. If you can get the face exposed you’ve got yourself a picture but if the face is too underexposed there probably won’t be much else of interest visible.
I’ll chimp the histograms on the back of my camera now and again. I don’t mind a lot of black in the images but want to see something at the highlight end.
Comments