The Official Secrets Act, Proud Galleries, London. 2009.
Live music photography is all about thriving in a hostile environment.
In the back rooms of pubs, where lanky boys can be found wearing their girlfriend's skinny jeans, the lighting tends to be extreme and uneven. What is acceptable to the ever-forgiving eye can be hard to record on camera. While the front man is hitting the high notes bathed in a halo of light, the lead guitarist may be smashing his strings in near gloom. Drummers fair even worse, relegated to the back of the stage, obscured by the contortions and charisma of the figure before them.
What follows are some thoughts on capturing the atmosphere of a live rock gig. When I turn up at a venue camera in hand, I am not interested in documenting the evening's event with the analysis and precision of a crime scene photographer. I do not care about the exact configuration of the drum kit, or which hole the singer had buckled his belt. This isn't beauty portraiture. When I review the images of the night, I want to smell the Jack Daniels and spilt lager. I want to feel the crunch of broken glass beneath my shoe.
Fast lenses are without a doubt the single most important piece of kit. They allow one to capture the ambiance of the environment and the spectacle of the performance. Slower lenses necessitate use of a flash. And in my experience, nothing destroys the atmosphere more than an indiscriminating blanket of light. I will return to the subject of flash a little later.
To gather the most light, I shoot wide open, typically f/2.8 or even f/2.0. The wide aperture minimizes shutter times and narrows the depth of field, very useful for isolating elements on a crowded stage. Indeed, the depth of field of my Canon 135mm f/2.0L portraiture lens is so narrow that it is possible to produce some very drunken yet curiously evocative imagery. As alluded to earlier, gig photography does not have to play by the rules - rock'n'roll is, after all, about sticking two fingers up at them. As long as the picture conjures some feeling, some mood, some sense of place and time, it doesn't necessarily matter that the wrong bits are in focus. Heresy, I know.
Not everything has to be in focus. The Delaneys, Bullet Bar, London. 2008.
Even with a fast lens, the shutter times are likely to be on the slow side. Handshake is a major issue. As a rule of thumb, shutter speed should be no longer than one second divided by the focal length of the lens. Obviously a pub back room full of sweaty, asymmetrically cropped kids is no place for a tripod. One must remain handheld. If the stage is so gloomy that I am doing no better than 1/30, then I will favour shorter focal lengths; if my camera tells me I have enough light, then I will try longer focal lengths. A lot depends on the steadiness of one's hand - and level of intoxication. Furthermore, speakers and other front stage clutter can be used to brace the camera. If there is a guard rail, use it. If one is feeling brave, use the edge of the stage.
A lens with optical image stabilization is another option. At best, image stabilization will give you up to three stops grace; that is, one can enjoy shutter speeds eight times longer than is normally possible. However, there is one important thing to remember: Image stabilization can only minimize the blur caused by the shaking of your own hands. It can't do anything about the performer twisting and writhing about on stage! Image stabilization may not necessarily be as effective in a live environment as one would hope for.
Focus is the next big challenge. Gloomy environments and fast moving objects do not make it easy for the camera to lock focus automatically. When the guitarist leaps in the air and you have a split second to capture the moment, it is dismaying to watch the camera trawl for focus when it should be sounding a satisfying click. If auto-focus is proving unreliable, the only option is to go manual.
Manual focus itself produces new problems. How can one focus fast enough when the singer's head is bobbing back and forth near the microphone? The simple answer is you can't. What you can do though is find a nearby landmark to focus on - say the microphone itself. Simply release the shutter whenever the subject is close enough to the focal point. If this proves too tricky, one can extend the margin for error by using a shorter focal length, thereby widening the depth of field.
I should perhaps say a few things about ISO speed. With the advent of digital photography, ISO has become another variable like shutter speed and aperture. A very profound development. However, in the arena of gig photography, we want to make the most of what light there is. Usually I end up shooting at 800 ISO on my Canon 5D Mark I. Although the image can be rather noisy in the shadows, it is more than acceptable.
And now, finally, we turn our attention to flash.
On-camera flash has a bit of a bad reputation. It is common to hear photographers proclaim how they hate flash and never use it, as if it somehow makes them superior to those who do. Truth is, flash is a tool, nothing more, and like any tool, can be misused. The trick is to know when to use it (and when not to.)
Modern day photographers are spoilt rotten when it comes to flash. All the hard work is done in microseconds by digital processors using sophisticated metering algorithms. Once upon a time though, photographers had to mess with guide numbers and perform fast arithmetic in their heads. Since their flash guns blasted light at a single intensity, shutter speed was the only way they could control the balance between foreground and ambient illumination. Today, variable-intensity flash guns free us to use whatever shutter speed and aperture we choose (within reason.) For gig photography this is a godsend.
When I do use flash I want the best of both worlds. Not only do I wish to preserve the ambiance of the space, I want a rich, crisp foreground that is frozen in time. You may have seen such pictures in magazines. How do they do it? Here is the secret: They don't.
All the stage lights are connected to a console that is controlled by a lighting designer. Here the lights can be dimmed and raised, pulsed and attenuated. For the best shots, one must simply wait until the lighting conditions are just right. Very often, the opportunity will never arise - but if it does, one must be ready to seize the moment and steal the great photo of the night.
The ideal time to use flash during a gig is during the rare moment when the performers are silhouettes in front of a hazy, dramatically lit background. The idea is to fill the foreground with flash whilst leaving the background alone. A dark foreground helps produce the most striking results.
First I switch my camera to aperture priority mode and take an ambient reading of the background. I twist my camera's dial to manual mode and recreate the settings. I achieve greater control and consistency this way. Then on my flash gun, I shift the output down one stop. This takes the edge off the intense flash illumination. Despite my camera being in manual mode, the Canon E-TTL2 flash system will still vary the intensity of the strobe to ensure the foreground is correctly illuminated.
So now I am ready.If the lighting designer chooses to blast the performers with dramatic thatrical lighting, I make sure my flash is off and use aperture priority mode. If he decides to go crazy with the lights and momentarily plunge the performers into shadow, I switch on the flash and twist the camera's mode dial to manual. All this takes just a couple of seconds.
