How to Photograph a Concert

From Flickr user Kmeron

Ever go to an awesome concert only to come home and find out that the pictures you took are horrible? Don’t have a fancy camera, tripod and other gear? Well, we have a couple tips to help you take fabulous photos at your next concert.

Raise the ISO: ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor that captures images in your camera. If you raise the ISO setting on your camera to say 400 or 800, the camera will take photos faster. So, your pictures are less likely to be blurry. Keep in mind that if you raise the ISO setting, the pictures will start to look more grainy. So, if you don’t have that great of a camera, try not to raise the ISO to its maximum level.

Spot Meter: The light meter is the part of the camera that determines the amount of light outside and adjusts the exposure of the camera to take consistently bright photos. The problem is that usually the camera looks at the whole image so that everything is sufficiently bright. During a concert though, the environment is generally very dark, but the performers are well lit. So when you take a picture, the performers end up being completely washed out. To fix this, you want to change the metering mode on your camera to spot meter. When in spot metering mode, the camera only looks at the middle 5% of the image and adjusts the exposure for that. That way, your picture will have a dark background with the performers well lit, just like you saw it.

Lower Exposure: If you can’t change the metering mode or tried changing to spot metering, but the pictures still come out too bright, then you need to change the exposure compensation. Exposure compensation is usually denoted by and EV with numbers like -2, -1, +1 and +2 around it. If you shift the exposure compensation indicator left to the negative numbers, then the image will come out darker. If you shift it to the right towards the positive numbers, then the image will becoming brighter. So, if people on stage look to bright, you can fix it by shifting the exposure compensation to the left a bit.

Keep those useful tips in mind the next time you try shooting a concert, and you will get much better pictures.

If you are searching for a camera that would be good for low light situations like concerts and parties, you need to look at the F-stop of the lens on the camera. It is usually denoted by a number like f/3.5. That number tells basically how much light comes into the lens. The lower that number, the more light that comes in. So, a f/2.0 is much better than f/4.5. Also you might want to look how far the camera can zoom. A camera with 2x zoom is probably useless unless you sit on the front row.