Mundy in Pro­file @ Dolans Ware­house in Limerick

I know that I posted this gallery pre­vi­ously, but I am tak­ing the lib­erty of repost­ing it as it is now the first col­lec­tion within my Gallery on JonathanBourke.Com. Please feel free to check it out!

Apart from lov­ing the music, and Dolans Ware­house for that mat­ter, I love con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy. It is by far and away one of the most chal­leng­ing gen­res within pho­tog­ra­phy. One sec­ond you are deal­ing with extremely low light lev­els, and the next, you are blinded by light. And all the time, the artist is jump­ing around stage like some­one pos­sessed. Com­pact cam­eras will not cut it in this envi­ron­ment. They are just too slow.

Dig­i­tal SLRs with stan­dard lenses might man­age one or two lucky shots. Image Sta­bilised lenses are not going to help either… you might be able to hand hold the lens in the low light, but the rapid move­ment on stage will still be a blur.

High ISO’s and Fast Lenses are your friends. Most of my con­cert shots are taken with a Canon EOS 20D at ISO 1600, and a Canon 50mm F1.4. Even then, I am happy if I have 10 shots out of a hun­dred which are accept­able. My set­tings are pretty much:

• Aper­ture Pri­or­ity, set to some­thing like F2.8 max, some­times right down to F1.4
• ISO set to 1600, 800 if I can get away with it
• Focus mode set to AI Servo… i.e. will attempt to track mov­ing objects
• Cen­tre Focus point selected
• Meter­ing nor­mally set to Eval­u­a­tive, but I some­times use Partial
• Drive mode set to continuous

And here is the kicker, White Bal­ance set to Auto. this is an issue which is often dis­cussed in rela­tion to con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy; i.e. how do you get accu­rate colours with all those crazy lights? My response to this is “Who cares?” In my mind, the crazy colours add to the drama and excite­ment of the event. I would never want to sub­due them…

Mundy, intro­duc­ing a lit­tle feedback!