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Concert photography help

shellbo6901
Enthusiast

Ive just recently gotten into concert photography and my first lens was a nifty fifty because Im usually up close. I brought my camera with me this weekend to try from far away, but ill let the picture explain itself. But what am I doing wrong or is it because I suck and maybe its just the lense. Ive cropped it also so you can see but this isn't the first time I've noticed this, because it usually happens when photographing a bright window. It turns a glowing purple and sometime pink/blue glaw also.The iso is 400, and i had only been going as high as 200, but I know theres more I should have done also.


cropped.jpg132A1285-4.jpg

 

14 REPLIES 14

https://www.bing.com/search?q=concert+photography&form=EDGNB3&mkt=en-us&httpsmsn=1&plvar=0&refig=92e...

John Hoffman
Conway, NH

1D X Mark III, Many lenses, Pixma PRO-100, Pixma TR8620a, LR Classic

shellbo6901
Enthusiast
If I were going to be far away more often then yes I would buy another play around camera. I’m often at the front and get perfectly fine photos so since I have this camera for work and use other lenses with it then I don’t need one. This is about the 3rd concert in 4 years I’ve been remotely this far away. There’s only a few shots from this show that are likely this the rest are basically what you’d expect from the lens and look real

I am not a big fan of "excessive photoshopping" but in a case like this you can clean up quite a bit in post.  And as coach noted, try spot metering to get close to the proper exposure on the most important part.  Maybe slightly over-expose the primary subject to avoid too much noise in the under-exposed areas (the ratio of this depends upon the body you are using), shoot in RAW, and clean up in post.

 

The human eye combined with the human brain and their combined ability to process on the fly, adjust for light level, and super-impose images still exceeds that of the best DSLR by a large margin so it still is far from easy to capture exactly what we see.  If it were a stationary object, you could increase dynamic range through a series of images with different exposure settings, but I doubt if the front man will cooperate by staying perfectly still even for a fast sequence of bracketed images.

 

And some of the potential audience for your images may like the "special effect" look that occurs with this difficult capture situation 🙂

 

Rodger

EOS 1DX M3, 1DX M2, 1DX, 5DS R, M6 Mark II, 1D M2, EOS 650 (film), many lenses, XF400 video

shellbo6901
Enthusiast
True! Didn’t say I was wasn’t happy... My first time shooting that far with the lens and camera. And only less than 10 have any purple glow/ whatsoever out of a few hundred. Just trying to up my game and not asking for help of course does no good.

Good for you. It is inevitable in these cases where we are searching for the context within which a particular photographer is seeking to improve that we will get a back and forth as we narrow down the parameters.

cheers, TREVOR

"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow", Leo Tolstoy;
"Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase" Percy W. Harris
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