Where To Start
We all would love to be hired by Lady Gaga or KISS or whoever the superstar of your fancy is and tour the world with them taking pictures; and secretly, be the rockstar of music photographers and get hired by Rolling Stone within one week while we’re at it too. But face it, if you’re just starting out, you simply don’t have the skills and portfolio to get *any* job shooting live music photos – if you have any skills and portfolio for concert photography at all…
So the way to go is to find concerts where you can build your live photography skills, then build a concert photography portfolio, and network with people in bands and the music business. That will then open the doors to photographing bigger bands and concert venues for you to take photos at. Yes, this takes a lot of time and work, sorry to rob you of your illusions.
Even if you’re not even the least bit interested in your local band’s show at the bar around the corner – go and take photos. It’s about learning how to take photos in a real live concert environment, not about who’s on stage, how small the stage or how bad their music is live. Ask the band and venue owner if it’s ok if you bring your camera, and just go ahead and start shooting photos.
That being said, the light in small bars is usually so crappy (namely, red, orange, and yellow – or green and blue… your camera will hate it!) that your photos will disappoint you even if you get past the point where they’re all out of focus, full of motion blur, and you cut off half of the guys’ arms.
But you get to exercise taking band photos for free. Imagine you *were* hired by the superstar band of your fancy to take photos at their live concerts, and you made all the mistakes shooting *them*! Now that would be embarrassing!
And you *are* going to make mistakes when you take pictures of a live music event. I know that you’re reading this how-to on live concert photography so you’ll be all prepared and won’t make any mistakes when you go taking photos of a band for the first time, but if there’s one thing I can tell you – you *will* make mistakes. And that’s a good thing, because you only learn from them – you never learn anything from success…
But I digress. So what are the magic live concert photography skills that I’m talking about? It starts with simple camera settings (at the first live concert I was taking photos at I was so nervous I set the camera to automatic mode… that didn’t work out too well :P ), and getting used to noticing when to change which ones depending on what the musicians and light are doing on stage.
So yeah, read all the how-tos you can find on concert photography, then ask a local bar that has live music if it’s ok if you take photos and then, and this is the most important part about it: Have fun!!
How To Get A Photopass
photo passes that I've collected as a concert photographer over the years
Once you’re past shooting pictures of concerts at local bars and your friend’s band you will need to ask for the magic photo pass to be allowed to take photos at concerts. Taking photos without a pass, e.g. from the audience, with a decent camera (SLR) can be done, though I consider it bad style. Not because of the artist on stage, but because it’s very likely that you’re going to annoy the other concert-goers and ruin your own experience lugging that thing around while people are spilling beer on it too.
A photo pass allows you to get your gear into the venue without any hassle, and sometimes gives you access to a better shooting place (Front of House, the pit, wherever it is that they cage concert photographers at the event in question).
If you’ve got a publication (online or print) that you’re taking photos for, you’re in luck. They can ask for a photo pass for you, or you can ask yourself telling them who you’re taking photos for. For many of the big concerts, only photographers from some sort of media are allowed a photo pass.
If you don’t have that sort of joker in your hands, all you can do is ask. Remember, the worst thing that can happen is that they say “no”. If you can get a hold of a band member or crew member, you can ask them, but try not to be too much of a groupie. For a business inquiry like the asking for a photo pass is IMHO, go through their management or record company, or the concert promoter (to whom you will be referred in most cases anyway).
Other than some people think, the management of the concert venue itself won’t be able to help you. It’s the promoter that you deal with at the day of the concert, even if you get the photo pass through the band’s management.
There is no magic trick or secret to getting a photo pass. It’s simply about politely asking – but you’re going to have to do that yourself; just sitting next to the phone isn’t going to make it ring…
Cameras and Lenses for Concert Photography
Don’t embarrass yourself by bringing your compact camera. If you need one argument, just compare the diameter of a professional lens with the one of your camera and ask yourself if there’s the same amount of light hitting the sensor behind it. And how fast your autofocus is in low-light situations such as a concert. See? Forget your cell phone and compact camera.
Of course it’s not the moving mirror that makes the SLR your weapon of choice for concert photography. You want to look for one that has a fast autofocus even in low-light situations – sadly that’s not something they write in camera specifications, but with the use of the great Google, Bing, or Yahoo of your preference, you should be able to find test reports on your camera.
My very personal opinion is that you want a Nikon camera – because of their superfast autofocus and superior performance in low-light situation, especially when compared to Canon cameras. Remember that there are other brands than the big 2 – Sony makes some very innovative ones, for example. Compare their specifications, read test reports, and compare their prices to your budget.
Whatever brand you go with, don’t take the cheapest camera that calls itself a SLR. They make those slow and with less good sensors. If you want to treat yourself, get a Nikon D700, that’s a very fine camera (that has the same sensor as the Nikon D3). With Canon, it probably would be a 5D mark ii, but I’ve read a lot of reports about that one having problems with the autofocus (they call it out-of-focus, I hear…), but you get the ballpark at which I’m aiming.
Why is autofocus so important? Well for one, things on stage often move quickly. Since it’s very low light (even with all the limelight, it surprises me sometimes how “dark” things still are), your aperture is going to be wide open (we’re getting to that in a second). Now that means that you have very shallow depth of field (there’s only a short range of things that are in focus, everything closer or farther away drifts out of focus), so you need to be able to control that very precisely. Since you are you and not my cat, your eyes ain’t made to see that well in the dark – and in the time it would take you to manually operate your focus or wait for a crappy out-of-focus-autofocus to be done, the person on stage has moved to another spot, you missed the moment.
Capturing “the moment” is what makes a concert photo a great concert photo. If you’ve got “the moment” on your photo, and it’s out of focus, you will invent all sorts of new words for swearing. Trust me, I have. And please do us all and yourself a favor and toss those photos. It’s not like you keep watching a video of a missed penalty shot if it’s your team that’s shooting, right?
Now, lenses. As you will need autofocus, your camera needs to be able to talk to your lens, so you’re limited to lenses that work directly with your camera (meaning: You don’t want a lens that you mount to your camera by means of an adaptor). You want a lens with a minimum aperture around 2.8 – over the whole focal length, if it’s a zoom! Remember, you can always close your aperture further down if you have to, but if your lens only opens to 5.6, you’re going to have very dark photos, and your autofocus won’t be happy about so few light either. Aim for a focal length somewhere between 24 and 200mm – obviously that will have an impact on the photos you take, but it’s a creative decision, not one based on you taking photos at a concert.
Whether you want a fixed-length or a zoom lens is a matter of budget and taste. Zoom lenses with low minimum apertures are of course more expensive than a fixed-length lens, but it also gives you more options. Some fixed-length lenses are sharper or have even lower minimum apertures (like 1.4) – it all really depends on the lens. If you’re unsure, get one that fulfills the above description and is rather on the cheap end. You will find out what you love about it and what you wish the lens had or did, and that will help you making a decision on which lens you’re going to throw a lot of money at.
Camera Settings
I’ve said it a couple of times already: At concerts, there isn’t a lot of light. So maybe you think that fixing your camera at the widest aperture your lens offers could be a good idea - but it’s not. A camera tries to make sure your photo isn’t underexposed. Now a concert photo has a lot of black in it (that’s supposed to be black), and that will make the camera think it will have to expose forever in order to produce a well-exposed photo – and boom, your exposure takes half a second and everything is blurry (not even Chuck Norris can hold a camera perfectly still during such a long amount of time – plus, people on stage are moving!!).
So try it the other way around: Fix the speed – and your camera will open up the aperture as wide as it can (and probably reach your lens’s limits and complain about the photo being underexposed, but with all the black that’s in it, that’s what we want, right?). For halfway normal people don’t go below 1/125th of a second, but you might have to go faster, especially if there’s wild jumping around and headbanging involved. Motion blur in concert photos just looks totally unprofessional in 99.9% of the cases, so try to avoid it as good as you can.
What to set your ISO at depends on the location, the light you get onto your subject, and your camera. There are cameras that show damn fugly noise at ISO 800, and there are cameras that don’t show noise at ISO 5000, and things get worse the darker your photo and environment become. You will have to find out what the “safe for noise” limit of your camera is.
As for auto-ISO, I’m personally not happy with it. Although you can limit where it goes, it still tries to take a well-exposed photo, and that’s precisely not what I want. I want my concert photos to be well underexposed. One, I want the blacks to be blacks, and two, I can always give it a decent bump in Lightroom later on. If it’s overexposed or blown-out, there’s nothing I can do to save the photo in postproduction.
My starting point for “normal” non-daylight concerts is manual mode, ISO around 800, f/2.8 at 1/140th of a second. Depending on what happens on stage, I change what I think needs change. There’s a lot of experience that goes into that, after you’ve seen and photographed some concerts you will develop an eye for how you need to adjust your settings depending on the changes of light on stage.