Saturday Night

[megatop412]

The bassist of my old band was in town(within 100 miles) with his new band Gorgasm on Saturday and I thought I'd try my hand at concert photography given that I bought a full-frame D700 recently and I wanted to test its low-light capabilities. The 4th Annual "New Jersey Death Fest" was hosted by Hartley's, in Arlington NJ. It was a small bar with no real 'photo pit'. It was a 2-day event and on Saturday 17 bands were scheduled to play. Got myself there about 4:30 and started shooting.

Place was VERY dark with hardly any stage lighting, and everyone wearing black didn't help. I tried getting some different angles but that proved very difficult to do without getting hit by people in the mosh pits. I avoided using flash as much as I could and tried shooting with primes(50mm and 85mm) wide open as well as a 24-85 f/2.8-4 but everything still came out grainy, some of the ISO's were pushing 6400. Open to settings suggestions here(Cary I know you've shot bands before, please lend your expertise)

'Parasitic Extirpation'
http://media9.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121020/182058.jpg
'An Aborted Memory'
http://media9.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121020/184500.jpg
'Dysentery'
http://media11.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121020/220721.jpg
'Putrid Pile'
http://media9.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121020/225729.jpg
'Deceased'
http://media10.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121020/234502.jpg
'Ghoul'
http://media9.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121021/004938.jpg
'Gorgasm'
http://media9.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121021/014919.jpg
http://media11.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121021/014711.jpg
http://media11.dropshots.com/photos/396780/20121021/014732.jpg

[steve1840]

Nice! What was your setup.

[megatop412]

Nice! What was your setup.

Nikon D700 with 50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.8, 24-85mm f/2.8-4. I was using continuous AF and a mix of auto-area and dynamic-area AF, and shooting in Manual mode with matrix metering

[Just_Lucas]

NIce shots for indoors (:

[Cary]

Good stuff. Venues with crap lighting and no security pit are a PITA...no way around it. My suggestions are pretty basic and you probably already know all of them, but shoot in RAW so you can adjust WB easily, bounce flash off the ceiling, put the camera on Auto ISO, and shoot in aperture priority or shutter priority. If the lighting stays pretty consistent, try shooting in manual. I use the back focus button on continuous AF, with the center point only. That way I can quickly focus and recompose as needed. If you can find videos of the band you're going to shoot, or know their routine, look for certain "moments" that make for a nice photograph. For instance, at a certain point in a certain song, the keyboardist of Motion City Soundtrack does a handstand on his keyboard...so I made sure I was in front of him for it:

http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4102/4812509027_e86b7b2c74_z.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/caryliao/4812509027/)
Jesse Johnson of Motion City Soundtrack at Warped Tour 2010 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/caryliao/4812509027/) by Cary Liao (http://www.flickr.com/people/caryliao/), on Flickr

[megatop412]

Excellent, thanks Cary! I had it in Manual because Aperture Priority wide open the camera was still selecting shutter speeds that were too slow to freeze movement. I was using auto ISO with a 6400 ceiling and big surprise, I ended up at ISO6400 for most of the evening(because any shutter speed slower than 1/100 was triggering it). I will keep the idea of using bounce flash in mind. Gotta love the learning curve with new bodies