You’d be hard pressed to find many shooting situations tougher than this one… shooting fast, live music in a low-light venue. There are many “priorities” fighting for top billing: proper exposure of course, fast shutter speeds for freezing the action, moving musicians that are hard to focus on, while hopefully rendering an image that isn’t too “noisy” from the required high ISO.
In my opinion, there was only one way to shoot this concert and that was the dreaded M. You got it… manual all the way, baby. You can kiss your Priority Modes goodbye. I knew they wouldn’t work, but just for grins, I tried using them after I had captured some good images in Manual. The result was as terrible as I knew it would be.
Priority Mode likes to try to shoot at 1/60th of a second at ƒ5.6. Forgetaboutit!! That shutter speed is way too slow, and shooting at ƒ5.6 is a luxury that would require an extremely high ISO. In theory, Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority should work, but the exposure was never close to correct. That leaves Manual.
To achieve these pics, I shot at either ƒ2.8 or ƒ3.2, depending where the subject was standing. My ISO varied between 1600 and 2000, and my shutter speed was 1/250th or 1/320th depending on the tempo of the song. Maggie Mae is slower than Hot Legs! And then there was color balance. There was virtually no white light in the place. Auto white balance was terrible - as was Incandescent mode. I found choosing 2500 K to be the closest if I cranked a whole lotta blue into it in custom settings.
I am normally a jpeg shooter, but this nite I chose RAW / NEF so I had more “tweakability” in PS CS5. My camera was a Nikon D3 with the 70-200 ƒ2.8 VR.
Rock on!
