While I always go to a concert if a band that I like is in town, I’m also happy to check out how my friends play when they invite me. Not long after getting the X-Pro 3 with a little 23mm F2 lens, a friend of mine invited me to a gig of the band he joined. I thought that it would be cool to document this event, despite them playing in a small bar that fits only about 40 people.
Concert photography in small clubs is quite challenging, especially for a first-timer. The lack of light, constantly changing lighting, musicians moving around, and the possibility of the crowd pushing you or spilling beer on your camera all add to the difficulty. With this in mind, I set my auto ISO to go up to 6400, set the minimum shutter speed to 1/250s to freeze motion, and opened the aperture to F2 to get as much light as possible. I also considered that since the band members would be moving, I should use tracking focus in zone mode. To increase my chances of capturing some bangers, I switched the drive mode from single shot to continuous shooting.
That night, I came home with over 500 images, but only about 20 were half-decent; the rest turned out to be complete trash. One of the major issues was that with zone focus, the camera often locked onto the microphone instead of the vocalist’s face. The constantly changing lighting also threw off the camera’s metering. By the time I half-pressed the shutter button, the light had already shifted, causing the auto exposure to be off for the actual shot. The stage background was noisy, but the band members turned out overexposed. Most of the photos turned out blurry, because there were not enough light to keep shutter speed at 1/250s.
Even though my friend liked the shots that I sent him in the end, I wasn’t satisfied with my results. I did some research before going to a concert with a camera next time. My biggest mistake was using the multi-metered photometry setting. This is a default metering mode that tries to make the entire frame evenly exposed. The problem is that lighting at concerts is very contrasty. There are a few light beams that fall on band members, but the rest of the stage is dark. So when camera tries to expose evenly for the whole frame, the light meter sees that most of the scene is dark and exposes for the dark areas trying to make them appear brighter, resulting in overexposed band members. To avoid this, you need to use spot metering instead and meter the light on faces. This way, band members will be properly exposed, you’ll also capture the stage light, but other areas of the stage will be dark as they actually are. With this metering approach it’s easy to keep the shutter speed at 1/250s to freeze motion. Another problem is that the light constantly changes, so you need to take a couple of spot measurements, approximate them, and use them in manual mode instead of relying on aperture priority. Auto face detection works well for me in certain environments; otherwise, I use point focusing. I mapped face detection to a function button near the shutter button, so I can toggle it quickly without digging through menus. If you use a digital camera, continuous shooting is definitely the way to go, but don’t set it to shoot too many frames per second.
I wrote a checklist with all these settings on my phone. On the way to a club, I set my camera according to the checklist so I wouldn’t forget anything. With this approach, I became confident in shooting concerts fairly quickly. Nowadays, almost all my concert shots turn out properly exposed and look amazing from a technical perspective.
At some point, it became so routine that I decided to try a new challenge—shooting a concert on film. That day, Mannequin Pussy was playing in Berlin. Their gig was at the Cassiopeia club, where I had been before. It has an average-sized stage without any fences or a photo pit, allowing you to get very close to the band. My camera of choice was the Olympus 35SP, which has a 42mm F1.7 lens, wide enough for this setup. Additionally, its light meter can work in a spot metering mode. I had a couple of Kodak Tri-X 400 rolls sitting in my fridge, known for their flexibility in being pushed and shot as high ISO film. I had never pushed film before and had always shot it at box speed. It was a great opportunity to try pushing for the first time, since I needed a fast film for the dark club. To have some flexibility, I exposed it at 3200.
Pushing is a technique where a film is underexposed during shooting but overdeveloped for extra time to compensate. It comes with the drawback of sacrificing details in shadows and increasing grain in the negatives. The more stops you push, the worse the results become. In my case, I pushed the film by three stops, which is quite severe. Typically, people don’t push Tri-X beyond 1600.
The concert was amazing, and I shot the entire roll of film without any regrets. I use The Massive Dev Chart to find how long to develop a certain film stock with a specific developer and development temperature. The charts usually have values for commonly used exposure indexes, but the data was missing for Tri-X 400 shot at EI 3200 and developed in HC-110. There were values for 1600 and 6400, though. I spent some time searching for information on Reddit and other forums, but for some reason, this combination isn’t popular and is barely mentioned. I was fortunate to find an old discussion on Flickr, where people recommended developing it for 18 minutes in dilution B using standard agitation. The example photos attached were convincing enough to try this formula. That same night, I developed the film, and the negatives looked promising.
The next morning, I scanned them, and wow, the results were fantastic! I didn’t even expect them to turn out that great! Of course, the photos were grainy, but since it’s a punk band, it felt like a match made in heaven. The flat shadows also gave the photos a vibe reminiscent of old punk zines.
When I shared my results online, someone asked how I measured the exposure for ISO 3200 when the maximum supported ISO by the light meter in the Olympus 35SP is 800. It’s actually pretty easy. If you don’t shoot in auto mode, the ISO setting on the camera is only used by the light meter to give you the exposure value. ISO 3200 is two stops more than 800, so you can check the EV for 800 and compensate for the two stops by increasing the shutter speed or decreasing the aperture.
It’s interesting to try shooting a concert on film actually rated for ISO 1600 or 3200. Recently, I got three rolls of ILFORD Delta 3200 but haven’t shot them yet. I’ll probably need a speed-enhancing developer to get the most out of it. Maybe it will be the topic of another post in the future.