David Emery OnlineHow to be a gig photographer pt.2
7 December 2008
Time for part 2 of ‘How to be gig photographer’ – part 1 can be found here.
In part 1 I talked about the kit – camera, lenses and flashes – and a little bit about technique, and now I’m going to finish up by talking about post-processing which might be more important then you think; while you can’t process a bad photo into a good one, you can certainly make a good one even better.
But first there’s a little bit of gear to talk about that I left out of the last instalment – memory cards. Like batteries, you can never have too many memory cards – they’re getting cheaper all the time so there’s no excuse not to have plenty. At the moment, 4GB cards are the sweet spot (for compact flash cards, at least); obviously you want the largest size card you can get, so you don’t have to keep changing them, but 8GB cards are still a bit overpriced (no doubt if you’re reading this in 6 months they’ll be the ones to go for). I carry 3 4GB cards around with me when I’m photographing a gig – each card gets me about 400 shots on it, which is generally enough for one act (if there’s the normal ’3 song’ rule), so I typically change cards between each band (you don’t really want to be changing cards mid shoot).
Memory cards are of course directly linked to how you post-process your images – If you’re thinking ‘how come you only get 400 images on a 4GB card?’ step right this way. I will say it as clearly as possible: if your camera has the ability to shoot in RAW, use it. Don’t be tempted to save a bit of cash on memory cards and disk space and use JPEGs – it’s not worth it in the long run. Disk space and memory is only going to get cheaper, and shooting in RAW massively increases what you can do in post processing; why would you want to spend all that time buying a camera, some lenses, blagging yourself a photo pass and hanging around a venue for a couple of hours and not save your photos in the best possible way?
So once you’ve got your stack of RAW files, what next? If you want to be ‘ghetto’ about it you could stick to the RAW software that comes with your camera and a bit of Photoshop, but I wouldn’t recommend it – similarly, consumer aimed software like iPhoto just isn’t going to cut the mustard when you have 800+ photos to process in one go. No, what you need is dedicated photo processing software and luckily their are two decent competitors – Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom.
Now, this isn’t going to turn into some kind of comparative review between these two as to be honest I don’t think it really matters – they both have demos so download them, play around with them and decide for yourself. I use Aperture, as it just works better for me – I much prefer its organisation and workflow (although I have a hunch that Lightroom may have better processing tools). So, the following is going to be quite Aperture specific, although I’m sure it’s easily adaptable to Lightroom as well.
Firstly, even before importing the photos I set up a new project with the name of the band and the venue. It might be surprising to some, but this is all I do as far as adding metadata to the photos go – I don’t do anything like tagging in Aperture (although I do add them when I upload to Flickr). Back in the day when I first started photographing digitally I meticulously tagged everything – that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? However, after a few years I realised that I had never – not even once – done anything with all this tagged information. Not even a simple search.
With gig photography, the problem is exasperated – what exactly are you going to tag all those photos with, other then the band name and venue? Are you really going to 1) tag every photo with a microphone in ‘microphone’ and 2) ever going to search for ‘microphone’? Thought not, and coupled with the large amount of photos you’ve got to get through you can see why I don’t do any tagging.
Aperture has this really nice feature called ‘stacks’ – basically groups of photos – that are pretty key to my workflow. On import Aperture will ‘auto-stack’ photos together, based on the time elapsed between the shots being taken which I normally set at about 10-15 seconds. I typically take bursts of shots – normally about 3-6 in one go, framing and then capturing the action as it unfolds – so being able to group them together as ‘one’ photo is a boon.
So, once the photos are loaded up it’s time to switch into full screen and start going through them – full screen is vital for this process as you need to have the images as big on screen as possible (and you have calibrated your screen, right?). I go through them all photo by photo, choosing ‘picks’ for each stack (i.e. the best photo from that group) and rating them – 1 star for unusable (normally out of focus or too dark), 2 star for ok but not great (maybe slightly out of focus, or similar to another better image), 3 star for good enough for Flickr (anything you’ve seen is 3 star or higher), 4 star for the best of a shoot and 5 star for really exceptional photos (one every six months or so).
The next part of my workflow could possibly do with some improvement, although it suits me; every time I rate a photo 3 star or better I adjust it on the spot. In theory I could probably save a little time by going though all of the photos first and then processing them, as normally I end up rating a few photos down to 2 star at the end (typically because I often end up with too many good ones that are similar), but I think it helps to make that final set of decisions on processed photos anyway.
So, onto the adjustments. First off, I normally take a punt on Aperture’s RAW ‘Auto Levels – separate’ function. What this does is automatically adjust the RGB channels separately to try and make them more balanced – it’s great for removing colour casts and giving your images instant ‘pop’ although be warned – it’s not that clever and can just as easily make your images worse, not better, so be careful. Next up – and the real reason to use RAW – is tweaking the exposure. Typically on a gig photo this involves upping it a little to bring out some shadow detail but you can’t normally bring it up too much as it’ll also bring out more noise. Also, be careful not to introduce some highlight clipping at the same time – easy to do if you have a spotlight on someone’s hair, for example – if you do, the ‘Highlights & Shadows’ sliders are very useful. They actually act work like a very simple version of HDR tone mapping by only working on specific tones of the image – so if you adjust the ‘Highlights’ slider you can tone them down a bit without affecting the shadows.
After tweaking the exposure I do a fairly standard brace of tweaks including slightly increasing the contrast and vibrancy (which is a ‘clever’ version of saturation that doesn’t affect skin tones as harshly) and doing a slight edge sharpen. I’ve also taken recently to making extensive use of the ‘Vignette’ tool as well, which darkens the corners of an image. When used in a subtle way I think it can be another useful tool to focus the viewer on the subject – slightly darkening the background can make something in the foreground really ‘pop’.
There’s one last key choice to make when processing a photo – whether it should be in colour or black and white. There’s a natural temptation I think to use colour in all your photos – after all, that’s how they come out of the camera – but I find black and white is another great tool to have in your arsenal; in fact, most of my favourite photos I’ve taken are in black and white. Normally I try black and white with any image that I feel the colour isn’t adding anything; you quite often get some really interesting lighting in a gig situation that can really ‘make’ the photo, but also often you might just have one colour of light that doesn’t add too much.
When you make a photo black and white, you actually have a further choice to make – what ‘filter’ to use. Back in the days before digital – I know, it’s hard to imagine… – when you were shooting with black and white film you would typically use different coloured filters which would change the characteristics of the image – whether green would come out as dark or light, for example. You can get the same affect when converting a photo digitally, and Aperture comes with a range of pre set colour filters. I typically start off trying the blue filter option as I find it provides the best results in terms of contrast and ‘interest’, but it does normally require a reasonable amount of light.
One last thing with regards to black and white images – I find they are normally a lot more tolerant to more extreme exposure increases, as noise is not so much of a problem in black and white. It’s not that it’s not there, but chroma noise (i.e. colour noise) is a lot less agreeable then luminescence noise. They also benefit from a bit more contrast as well.
That’s basically it as far as adjustments go, other then the odd cloning out of dust sports. I generally don’t do much in the way of cropping but on occasion an image needs it – don’t be afraid of a bit of trimming here and then.
After doing that roughly a 80 times or so – I find I have a fairly consistent 1-in-10 rate of picks Vs taken – all that’s left is to do a final pass through to weed out the really good ones and upload them to Flickr. It’s worth trying to limit how many you upload if you can help it, as no-one really wants to sit through countless similar photos of the same band (I am very guilty of this, of course – do as I say, not as I do etc).
I think that’s pretty much it – hit me up in the comments if you have any questions.