David Emery OnlineZoom With Your Feet
6 February 2010
“3 songs, no flash.”
It’s the standard – and also mildly disappointing – phrase you hear more times then not when you pickup your photopass before a gig. I ‘get’ why it’s done – I know if I was a band I’d want fans in front of me rather then photographers, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. If you don’t know the venue there’s always that hope that maybe they don’t have a strict policy, although chances are that if they don’t have limits then they probably don’t have a photo pit either which brings its own set of challenges (mostly surrounding the fact that you’re pretty much rooted to the spot).
I know, I know – never happy, always complaining.
The lack of flash is normally ok – I’ll use flash if I can, but only to boost up the light that’s there already; pretty much all of my favourite photos I’ve taken are made interesting by the stage lights. That being said, every now and then you come across a gig where the lighting guy decides not to put the front lights on and you’re pretty much screwed (see Julian Casablancas at the Forum where I only had a couple of decent shots from the photo pit, and one of those was illuminated by someone in crowd using flash…).
The 3 song rule though is a bit more challenging. That gives you about 10-15mins to take all of your photos, which really ain’t a huge amount of time. You’re really under pressure, and you’ve got to somehow get decent shots whilst also varying them as well – no one wants 20 identical shots from a gig.
Now, I exclusively use prime lenses for all my photography – a ‘prime’ lens being a fixed lens that doesn’t zoom – which makes it doubly hard when working under the 3 songs rule – do you waste time between songs changing lenses to vary it up a bit, at the risk of getting less useful shots if you’re shooting with a longer (more zoomed in) and potentially missing something while you’re switching, or do you stick with one lens throughout risking having lots of shots that look the same?
Normally I try and swap between lenses but this week I shot Vampire Weekend, who performed at the Garage in Islington, and if you’ve ever heard their music you’ll know that they have a predilection for pretty short songs which makes things a bit tricky – no real time to switch lenses.
All is not lost though – you just have to move your feet a bit. Compare these two photos:
Both of these are shot with the same lens (the Canon 24mm f/1.4) but are obviously at different ‘zoom’ lengths – the first being a 2/3rd body shot with a good amount of background in, and the second being much more head and shoulders based. All you have to do to get between those two ranges is either hang back a bit or push a bit further forward; these aren’t the best examples to be honest as you could push it a bit more if you want to – the second one is as far forward as you can go really, but you can certainly get more zoomed out then the first if you want to; a photo bit is at least a meter deep, and you can normally lean in by about half a meter as well giving you 1.5m of ‘zoom’ that’s easy to forget you’ve got.
You can see more photos from that gig here, and my 2 part ‘How to be a gig photographer’ series here and here.