Help with Gig Photo techniques

[H4V0C]

Hi guys,

I need a little bit of help understanding how to get good shots photographing a gig for a few old friends,their in a punk band so i expect lighting to be low.ive went out to buy a canon 50mm prime with the 1.8 aperture,but recrating the type of lighting in my room is abit hard and the photos are still blured,

Any ideas of the best settings? my cameras a 500D so it has a high iso,but i want to keep alot of quality,so going high for me is abit of a no no,but will go if i must.

Cheers

John

[ianpinion]

Hi John,

It's a tricky little quandary this, because you need to be able to attain a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action and eliminate any potential camera shake without the prospect of noise appearing in the darker areas of your image. Obviously, using a fast lens is going to help improve your camera's performance in lowlight conditions, but to help you find the best settings with which to take the shots you're going to first set your aperture value at. I would put the camera into manual mode and set the aperture,taking into account your depth of field when shooting at your chosen focal length. Make sure you check on the DoF Master what effect this will have and use your depth of field preview button to double check it. Then calculate what your minimum shutter speed has to be to freeze the action and eliminate any possible camera shake (of course, you could use a tripod and remote release to stop this). Using the histogram as your guide, adjust the ISO until you can achieve a correctly exposed image using your predetermined aperture and shutter speed.

Your camera can control the level of noise quite well, even at the higher ISO levels, if the image is correctly exposed, but if you're still not happy with the results then you may have to resort to using either a flashgun or some additional lights to help improve the overall light levels falling on your subject.

[chris-p]

Best advice I got was this:

ISO 800
Aperture as wide as it'll go
Shoot

Noise isn't too much of an issue in gig shots. It tends to lend atmosphere and, if there's a smoke machine going makes little difference!

Have a look at some shots a friend of mine took (he's on here but not seen him for a while, TommoR). He used this advice with a Sony a300 (so with nowhere near the high ISO performance of the 500D) and the results were great...

I'm sure he won't mind me linking to his shots.... (!)

LINK