My friend Will, who I played with in School of Rock, is now in a band called The Cessna. I was invited to their first show at Bookclub Chicago. Usually I'm not very excited to go and stay out late on a week night, but I was looking forward to this show so I wasn't really feeling that this time.
When I got to Bookclub, I met my friends and felt very welcome. I usually don't feel very comfortable in music venues, but I did here. They were playing Godzilla movies on the TV behind the bar too which I loved.
Earlier this week I thought I'd like to get into concert photography more. Since I like music and I like taking photos, it seems like an obvious choice.
I got a new 7artisans 50mm 1.2 lens for the show and took these photos on my X-T10 using the same film simulation as the last post.
The artists that performed were Thrussy Galore (another friend of mine who I played with at School of Rock and the host of that night's show), The Cessna, Charlie Buckets (Thrussy's sister), and Cloud Houses.
I had fun watching the performances, but I think it’s hard for me to enjoy the music when I’m focusing on taking pictures.
The lens I got was full manual, which I normally prefer, but for a fast-paced setting like a concert, auto-focus may have been nice to have. There were a lot of photos that, when I looked at them on my computer at home, were pretty useless because the focus was off.
Another thing that I should improve is the film-simulation that I used. I think it does look good, but because the highlights are boosted, it made some photos look overexposed. This is something I could fix by learning how to edit the RAW photos and creating some presets to apply to them. I haven’t done that before so the photos in this post are all straight-out-of-the-camera jpegs, but now I have some good photos to practice on.
I was also fighting with the ISO settings in the on-screen-menus a lot which was distracting and lead to some shots with bad exposure. Leaving it on auto ISO didn’t always give me the exposure I was wanting. Maybe I need to play with the exposure dial on my camera more.
I’m thinking about getting another camera for concert photography though. Something like the X-T2, which has a dedicated ISO knob and also 2 SD card slots, and a higher megapixel sensor. It’s also got a better EVF and a larger screen, which has portrait tilt too.
I absolutely love my X-T10 but the improvements on the X-T2 might be significant enough to make it a worthwhile upgrade. Especially if I eventually get hired to shoot bands, having the redundant SD card would give me some peace of mind.
I do think I got quite a lot of good photos though and had quite a hard time narrowing them down to this selection that I have here.
One thing I tried doing that I think I was successful at was lowering the shutter speed to 1/2 to try to get some motion blur. I had to compensate by lowering the ISO in the settings. For the first couple of shots I tried a 1/1 shutter speed but that let in too much light and you couldn’t make out the faces of the performers. I also tried starting with the camera pointing away from the performer and moving it in to end on them, but I think I learned that starting with the performer and hanging on them until the very end before moving the camera away worked out better.
I do want to try this technique with a flash too. I saw a video online where I think they had the flash set to second shutter so the photographer first aimed the camera at some lights, then moved the camera to the subject, and the flash before the second shutter gave enough light to make sure the subject was clearly visible in the final photo. I suppose that would work in reverse too by starting on the subject with a flash and then moving away.
Overall, I’m happy with these photos that did come out. I also had fun watching my friends perform, meeting some new people, and chatting about cameras, Godzilla, and Rush.
