Photo by: Kmeron.

Found this shot in the “Concert” tag on Flickr. At first glance, I really liked it. I think it could have been cropped a little tighter (cut off a bit on the top) for better composition, but otherwise nice. The black and white conversion is cool. But it also highlights a problem with photographing in low-light conditions (like a concert) – blur and image size. If you look at this image in a small size (like the thumbnail in the sidebar or the medium size in this post), it looks pretty crisp. If you click through and look at the large or full size image, it gets really blurry.

In this case, it was shot at 1/160, which is relatively quick. But, it was also shot at 180mm focal length. What probably happened here is some camera shake (and the guitarist’s hand might have been moving quick enough to cause some motion blur there). When you’re looking at the LCD screen on your camera, it’s easy to take a quick glance and assume that a picture is crisp and/or in focus. Then, you get home, fire up Lightroom, and that 1:1 preview makes you cringe. Eugh. Not a lot you can do here. I’m not sure how good the D700 is at high ISO levels, but jacking that up (from 1250) to get another stop out of the shutter speed might have helped…

Still a nice pic, though. As long as you’re not printing it, you can still be happy with a shot like this. I have, however, had similar shots that looked good at first and then looked not so good once they hit the printer.

Photo by: j.tree.

I was browsing through the recent uploads on Flickr, and I came across a picture from a Weezer concert (not this one). I followed through to it, looked through the photostream, and saw this pic. It really caught my eye. The lighting in the venue must have been good… the picture is crisp, the ISO wasn’t too high (i.e. there isn’t too much noise). It also catches a nice bit of action here. Shooting concerts can be a nightmare when you don’t know what the lighting is going to be like… and clearly it was crazy lighting (see all the blue around), but it was also bright enough to allow for some nice pictures.