Ok, so I had my first official photography “concert” gig. It wasn’t the Stones or Madonna, but it was still pretty cool. Mampalooza was put together to raise money for the Motherhood Foundation. There were 3 comedians and 5 bands performing (thought I had to bail when the 4th band was done since we had another party to go to).

I was their photographer and I thoroughly enjoed it. It was wonderful to be there taking photographs of so many talented comedians and musicians.

Is this the first of many more to come for me? Who knows. I’m taking it one step at a time for now, but let me tell you about my experience.

I woke up early in the morning to get my equipment ready. I took with me my Canon 30D with 3 lenses: a Tamron 28-300MM F3.5-6.3 (http://www.tamron.com/lenses/prod/28300_di.asp), the Canon 50MM 1.8 and the standard Canon 18-55MM that came with the camera. I also took my Canon 580EX flash.

I love the Tamron lens. It performed great. However, if you are taking pictures in a room with low light, you better bring your flash, because it’s a slow lense (F6.3 at 300MM). The pictures are pretty sharp, however, you have to be really good at focusing manually because the auto focus is not the greatest (it’s kind of slow and in my opinion not the best).

I did, most of the time, keep the focus set to auto with center point focus and man, it did not focus well (I figured that out when I got back home and downloaded the images into Lightroom). So my recommendation is take 2 or 3 of the same images of whatever you are taking just for safety.

My whitebalance was set to auto. I usually set it to custom and adjust it to get warmer picture, but I did not want to mess with it because I knew I could warm it up later in post.

My ISO was set at 100 since it was an outside concert and it stayed like that from noon to 4pm. I did have to use the 580EX flash quiet a bit for fill flash and I have to tell you I love this flash. It performs well, recycles quickly and gives you a very natural looking photograph. I was surprised that the batteries lasted for the entire 4 hours without having to change them.

I shot a lot of close ups and they looked great (blured the background and made the subject look really good). Again, thank you Tamron.

So that was my equipment. Now on to what I learned after shooting over 450 photographs in a 4 hour period.

Man, you’ve got to wear confortable shoes since I was standing throughout the entire concert (with few bathroom breaks). I don’t like to take “eating breaks”, though they did offer me one, because it throws my concentration off and I don’t want to feel fool when you have to run around from corner to corner to get the shot.

I have to make sure next time I bring a water bottle and a health bar just to keep my energy up, thought the good music kept pushing me.

One thing I did not expect, and learned, was that musicians will play to your camera if they notice you. That is, they’ll look at you and give you a smile or do something cool, so make sure you are ready to take the photograph.

If I didn’t see any good shots I could take at the current moment, I kept the camera on my eye and looked for picture moments. You never know when the right picture was there to take.

That’s the cool thing and the bad thing about taking pictures in concert; you never know when the right moment will come. It just comes and you better have taken it.

I also learned to take some closeups of their hands; that is, their hands playing the guitar, or the piano or whatever instrument they were playing. It makes for great photographs in a layout next to full shot of them playing.

One cool trick I used which I learned in the photo school I went to was to zoom all the way into them, set my shutter speed to a slow speed, close up my F stop, turn on my flash and then take the picture, but at the same time pull the zoom quickly back out before the picture finished.

This gave the photograph energy by creating trails of the people, almost like they were being sucked out into a black hole, but the subject itself was clear due to the flash. Pretty cool stuff. I loved doing that. (See picture).

After 4 hours of shooting, I was done. I could not take it anymore and anyhow, that was the arrangement I had with the organizer. My wife came with me as an assitant and 2nd shooter. She took photographs of the booths and the audience while I concentrated on the performers. She took over 200 photographs.

Overall, I had a fantastic experience doing this concert and I look forward to doing many more. You can check out all of the images of that concert at http://www.marcelolewinphotography.com/

For post-production, I’m on an iMac G5 with Adobe Lightroom 1.0. I love Lightroom (thought I do use Apple Aperture 1.5 too) due to it’s speed. It’s very fast, much faster then Aperture is at processing imagers.

Utlimately, I’m going to deliver most likely around 200 images to the client since not all of them are nice. I will, however, deliver to her only after I’m done doing all of my post activities (warming up the pictures, fixing exposure, cropping, etc.)

Well, that’s it for this blog entry, until my next one.

Cheers!
Marcelo
The Digital Media Dude
http://www.thedigitalmediadude.com/
marcelo@thedigitalmediadude.com