Due to some unfortunate circumstances for Rick, he was unable to attend Taste of Chaos this year, but I was able to go in his stead. This was my first show that I was able to use my digital camera at. I posted my review yesterday if you’d like to check it out.
Things didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. “How hard is it to take a few pictures,” I thought. It turns out it is pretty hard to get nice looking shots. After doing a little research online, I found that concert photography is one of the most difficult situations to shoot in especially with a consumer point-and-shoot camera like my Canon SD500.
Shows always have 1) low light and 2) lots of action. Those aspects combined make it very hard to capture the experience.
Here are my 3 best shots.
Most of the rest of them were too blurry or were out of focus. I plan on trying to edit them in Photoshop later. Two of those used flash, which is a no-no for concerts from what I read.
I ended up turning up my ISO speed to 400 as that’s as high as my camera will get. Sad, because I was reading on some sites that you don’t want to go below 1200 and at absolute minimum, 800. After reading that, I pretty much assumed my camera isn’t going to be very good for concerts.
Next time I think I’ll be better prepared and certainly I’ll know more of what to expect. I found my best shots were when I set my camera to burst mode. It takes a bunch of shots as long as I hold down the button. Not only does it make for some cool time-lapse type effects, but you get better quality pictures. As I said already, I’m going to keep that ISO as high as I can to stop the action. Any suggestions are welcome.
x
