David Emery Online

Photo pass

31 January 2008

Last night I got my first opportunity to enter that dead-zone that occupies the space between the most enthusiastic fans and a band performing their heart out; I am of course talking about the photographers pit.

Now, I’ve been right at the front taking photos at many gigs before – in fact, most of the gigs I go to these days don’t even have a gap between the band and the crowd – but being in the pit is a completely different experience. It’s a rush, quite frankly; you’re so close to the action but also aware of the immense crowd behind you, and there’s an implied pressure to take really good photos that you don’t get if you’re just standing near the front snapping away.

The band in question was the brilliant British Sea Power who were even better then I thought they would be. On their latest record, ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’, the songs sound epic and live they’re simply immense. As an added bonus I totally lucked out in that the security didn’t turf us out into the crowd after 3 songs (which is the norm, I think) so I got to witness the entire set sitting down at the front. Totally the best way to watch a gig, that…

From a photography point of view my new 50mm f/1.8 completely came into its own; not only does it work exceptionally well in low light but its sharpness and colour reproduction is just sublime. Although that said I’ve discovered that it’s a bit tricky to use at f/1.8 as the depth of field is just too low in a live music setting – people just move too quickly, and it’s all too easy to get the mic in focus but the person singing into it blurred. Stopping down to f/2.2 seems to produce more keepers.

Although, that’s actually not too much of a problem as I have a habit of taking far too many photos; I managed to use up all the memory I had two-thirds of the way into the gig, which doesn’t sound too bad until you discover I had 4756mb of storage available to me. Now, I shoot in RAW (which is vital for gig photography as exposure tweaks are quite often necessary giving the unpredictable lighting) but that still adds up to over 550 photos in total. I can’t quite decide whether to get another memory card or not; I missed some interesting shots at the end of the gig when they had a giant bear on stage, but I’m not sure if I really want to take even more shots – it took me a good couple of hours to process and organise all the ones I had already.

Finally, here’s a pick of the best ones – more can be found on my Flickr: