Concert Photography

Concert photography, although one of the reasons why I started out with photography, is one of those segments of photography I hardly ever practice anymore.

Why? Well because of a number of reasons.

1. It's not easy to get into the big concerts with great headliners.
2. It's a lot of work, The smaller concerts let you in but usually expect hundreds of photo's in return.
3. It's not so much about photography, timing and composition will make you stand out from the rest.
4. It is much more about, equipment and politics.

I know it's a bit short sighted but I am just trying to make a point. As a concert photographer you are an observer not a director. The better you observe, the better your photo's will get. Knowing all the little habbits of the artist or getting to know the lighting designer, can help you to push the shutter at the exact right moment.

But if you are not really into people, I am not, concert photography just boils down to 3 things: luck, equipment, composition.

Equipment:
- Get a body with great ISO performance 1600 or more
- Get at least 2.8 lenses from 10mm up to 500mm
- No, no flash :)
- Spend a lot of money and go

Composition (can be challenging)
- you are most of the time litteraly at the feet of your idol or ... some other musician.
- A lot of rubbish is in your way, mikes, other musicians, construction poles, ...
- Musician have a bad habbit of not standing still, the ones that do stand still are boring.

Luck:
- yes, you will need it.

So why do I still bother? I can't help it, I just love the feeling, being frontstage, while thousands of people are standing behind you, feeling just a little bit jealous :). And sometimes, when you are really lucky, you do get that one lucky shot which could just make your day. (I'm still waiting)

What follows are some shots of the last concert I did, Afro Latino 2012, lovely atmosphere, great music, and great organisation. Did I already mention that those are also reasons why concert photography is worthwhile practicing? 

Brenizer and cows

This weekend I stumbled upon fstoppers.com. It's more or less the photographers heaven, so much information all combined in one site. Thanks guys for the wonderful site, I'll be checking it out on a regular basis.

One of the articles I was most interested about, was the one about the Brenizer effect. This article explains how you can create a wide angle picture and still preserve a shallow depth of field, something which is not possible to achieve with any wide angle lens. What Brenizer  basically does is: Create multiple pictures with a portrait lens (50mm - 85 mm) and stitch those pictures together to get a wide angle picture.

Wanting to try out this technique as soon as possible, but being short of models, I decided to go into the wild :). A couple of weeks ago a number of cows have been set loose in our backyard. So I figured why not shoot the cow.

It turned out to be a little bit more challenging than I anticipated. The cows did not listen, what ever I did, they came in to close. But in the end I did get something which was more or less acceptable. Not quite the result I was hoping for, I guess a little bit more practice will be needed. Next time I will try this out with a more intelligible model :)

Getting to know the cow, Tip (for the city people out there): I figured this one out by accident, walk into some cow manure, go sit somewhere comfortable and wait until the cows approach you. They will come to you and lick the manure of your shoe. Well done, you just bonded with a cow.

Making your first shots, letting them get used to the camera.

Go for the final result, the next picture are actually three pictures stitched together. As I said before, not the best result. I should have created a bit more distance between me and the cow, but she was so fond of me that she kept following me.

Just one more thing, be careful. Cows may look stupid, they also weigh 700kg, you do not want to mess with their feelings. Be gentle, tell them nice things, like how wonderful they look, how great they are as a model, the best you have ever worked with and stuff like that you know what I am talking about.

I'll definitely will be trying out this technique again in the future, hopefully with some better results.