First Concert Shots

[cliffmccartney]

Hi everyone,

I've been off the forum for a couple of weeks. It's the start of school here - just a bit busy.

I've been playing around with high ISO values (higher than I'm used to, anyway). I took these shots at a recent concert by the Darrell Webb Band.

Nikon D7000, Nikon 85mm f/1.4G AF-S. All at f/1.8, manual exposure, ISO 1250, 1/320 sec, -3 EV










Adjusted the WB after the fact to 2500, and used DFine 2.0 from Nik to reduce noise. No other significant PP.

C&C most welcome. Thanks for viewing!

Cliff

[Geoff F]

With the first three, Cliff, I think I would like to try a crop to reduce some of the space at the top and/or bottom to concentrate closer on the performers.

Not sure if that would work OK if you want to end up with 'standard print' sizes.

The actual technical quality of the shots is very good. And obviously taken in what was far from ideal lighting.

[John Morton]

Wow! Very nicely done! Concert shots are really difficult to nail, because the lighting is often very difficult to deal with: there can be different light sources, with different color temperatures, and the spots tend to be very intense against what is often an unlit background; so most people tend to overexpose by metering for the majority of the shot, which is the background, and end up forcing the highlights to burn out.

I notice that you've set the exposure compensation to -3 EV: that's an excellent strategy for preventing the highlights from burning out while allowing the camera to keep metering while you concentrate upon shooting.

Here's one of my concert photos, for your interest, so you can compare the kind of settings I like to use. I tend to go with a slower shutter speed because I really like trying to get just a touch of motion blur in the musicians' hands, but without getting any blur in their faces (hopefully):



This was taken with a Nikon D700 at ISO 1600 using a shutter speed of 1/90 sec (in shutter priority mode); with an AF-S Nikkor 70mm-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G lens at 260mm (VR on, obviously!) with an aperture of f/13 and -2 EV compensation.

The band's management company actually purchased this image from me for an use in an article, so that was pretty cool.