Concert focus issues: Cap it

Getting to be on stage makes for some good closeups.

I took live shots for Modernsextrash on Friday at Envy Nightclub in Minneapolis, Minn. It was not the dark and difficult environment I faced last time I shot live with them, thankfully. It was still a challenge, but I have to say I enjoy the results, in part thanks to a little DIY trick I tried out.

I also like how being on stage makes crowd shots easier.

I have a DIY straw grid snoot that started falling apart, making it a vaguely useless snoot, since it is a bit short. So I taped over the end and sealed it from escaping light, then pushed it entirely over the head of my Canon 580 EX flash, which I had pointed upward. When I zoomed it to 105mm and put it on 1/128 power, you could hardly tell anything was fired, and I was assured to only waste a nominal amount of battery power.

This black flash cap didn’t work perfectly (I still had focus issues), but I’m pretty sure it helped quite a bit. I also like that the infrared focus assist light on these flashes is less disruptive to stage lighting than those in-camera white beams.

I find autofocus a necessary evil because I just can’t focus with my eyes, especially on smaller viewfinders. And since autofocus is truly becoming a powerful and dependable thing, it’s not really much of a hindrance anymore. However, its true weakness is darkness, which is pretty much my leading live music challenge these days.

How do you work around this when you are stuck with cave-lighting? I’ll share a few tips:

• Learn how deep your depth of field is, focus on something brighter in that range, turn off AF, reframe and shoot. This action gets a lot faster after practice/experience.

• Refocus a ton, repeat the above step. Something will come out. Hey, shooting in bunches is a valid technique. I promise!

• Use focus-assisting devices, as I mentioned above. But do make sure you aren’t disrupting the stage lighting, or the band, etc. If you use these, you probably want to take fewer pictures overall. Always be respectful! Life is hard enough for concert photographers, and we don’t need jerks to make it harder.

Feel free to ask any questions or comment in general. Thanks!

Listening: Pete Seeger (Happy 90th!)