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Five Tips For Beginning Concert Photographers

Chris Gampat
No Comments
02/24/2014
3 Mins read

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When you’re starting out as a concert photographer, you should know one thing first and foremost: you’re probably not going to get paid a lot of money or even at all. And you’ll be doing this mostly for the thrill and the experience until you can network your way to the top. Once you’ve accepted this fact, then you’ll be able to move onto the other aspects that are very important to the creation of concert photographs.

And as you’re first starting out, here are a couple of tips that can help you.

Get As Close To the Stage As You Can

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Shooting from really far away isn’t going to help you out very much unless you have a long telephoto lens of some sort. So you should try to arrive early and either talk to the venue or the bands to see just how close you can get to the stage. Our recommendation is to get as close to the stage as you can really get in order to capture a wide variety of emotions, moments, and even portraits.

Shoot Semi-Wide to Normal Focal Lengths

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Essentials Summer Concert Shooter (6 of 7)ISO 2001-50 sec at f - 1.4

Then there’s your equipment. For what it’s worth, we recommend shooting at around the 35mm to 85mm (maximum) focal lengths. A 50mm lens can afford you quite a bit of versatility when you want to go from shooting the front man to the drummer. Depending on where you position yourself, it can also help you get a great vantage point to capture crowd/band interaction and other really intense moments.

Also note that once you take a spot, chances are that you probably won’t get to move around often so you’ll be stuck there. With that said, realize that there will totally be moments that you can’t get no matter how hard you try. This is an instinct that lots of budding shooters need to fight.

Fast Aperture Lenses Are Key

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Fujifilm X Pro 1 review images mxpx (15 of 22)ISO 6400

While some pros may tell you to go for f2.8 zoom lenses, we believe that f2.8 is too slow an aperture for many sessions in dark clubs that have the lights changing up every couple of seconds. The lack of reliable lighting can not only mean that your exposures won’t always be spot on but your focus may also be off at times. For those moments, we recommend shooting at f1.4 or stopped down a tad to f2. Combine this with the fact that you’re shooting a 50mm or 35mm lens and you’ll most likely have enough in focus due to the way that depth of field and lenses works despite being wide open or stopped down a bit.

Go for the Intimate Moments

Chris Gampat The Presidents of the United States Pokemon White and Black The Phoblographer (4 of 15)

One of the fundamental pillars of photojournalistic shooting is that you need to go for the intimate moments involving emotion. A concert provides for a lot of those whether it’s members of the crowd getting really into the music or its crowd/band interaction, stage diving, or moments between the band members synergizing on stage. These moments, if framed properly, can create some radical images.

Be Predictive of Movements

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Lastly, the most important thing that you could do is learn to predict movements and read the body language of the band members. Basically, if you see the moment in your viewfinder, chances are that it’s already gone and you missed the shot. So to prevent that from happening, you’ll need to learn to anticipate and pay lots of attention.

And on top of that, don’t chimp your LCD display to check and delete images. It’s a critical time that you can miss something.

For more, please follow us on Facebook, Google+, Flickr and Twitter.

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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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