It was with some trepidation that I agreed to take on my first piece of commissioned work recently – a music gig. To date I’d only taken shots for my benefit, not for others'.
It was an incredibly valuable experience and I’ve captured the key learning points below.
Before lifting the camera
Asking the right questions was critical. Before the event I made a point of speaking to the band to understand what exactly they were looking for; whether there were specific shots that the band wanted; the light conditions that I could expect and how they intended to use the images.
This insight prompted me to research low light photography, specifically ISO and shutter speed settings. This preparation removed much of the anxiety.
Manual vs. Shutter Speed Priority vs. Aperture Priority
Throughout the evening I chopped and changed my approach, but kept coming back to shutter speed priority. Through advanced reading and initial experimentation, it became clear that I needed a shutter speed of at least 1/125 (if not 1/160) in order to capture the band members without motion blur. Fortunately the band stayed relatively still throughout.
The light conditions were so changeable that shooting in manual mode was too tricky as I needed to be able to capture images instantly. The only exception was when I used my fixed 50mm lens, where shooting with shutter speed priority produced an aperture of f1.8 - resulting in the depth of field being too narrow. I therefore experimented with aperture priority and manual.
(Throughout the evening I opted for an ISO of 3200/6400 and relied on reducing noise during post-production.)
Next time I'll start with shutter speed priority and be willing to improved but I've some further reading to do! I guess it also depends on the lens that I'm using at the time.
The more the merrier?
Over the course of the evening I shot 900+ images by using the burst function. At the time this gave me the reassurance that it would increase my chances of getting a greater number of acceptable shots.
In hindsight I should have had greater conviction and trusted my ability as it meant far much more work post-shoot and has brought about a couple of different problem... post-production workflow and storage (I shot RAW).
As for my chosen workflow, I tagged the images, sifted through them and picked out the stronger ones to work on before uploading them to my Flickr photostream. My mistake was not deleting duplicates and shots out of focus/poorly composed. Next time I'll delete those surplus to requirements first.
For now, I've been able to delete a significant number of RAW files but it won't be long before I need external hard drives.
So, in summary, consulting with the band helped immensely but I need to find a more efficient workflow.
