Guides

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be penalized for my work-flow. I feel shooting in RAW file format is a necessity and here’s why:

1. Flexibility - Once you’re at the point where you are downloading and reviewing your photos, it’s all over. You can’t go back and re-do. I’m a perfectionist and I don’t like having my photograph’s quality altered from the get go. With RAW you have the freedom to tweak your photograph’s exposure and/or white balance, while maintaining your photographs up most quality.
2. Quality – You are not hindered with 8-bit color depth, so now you are working with more color depth @ 16-bit. This is great for printing your work, but be sure to save out your RAW file as a .Tiff, because JPEG format doesn’t support 16-bit color depth.
3. Safety – Each time you save a JPEG file you are compressing it more and more, but this is not the case for RAW files. When you tweak your RAW file you are not causing irreversible damage to the file and you can always reset the file back to the way it was originally.

There are a few disadvantages to shooting RAW however:

Are you the determining factors in your photograph or is the camera? For a good amount of time I’ve let my camera do a big part of my work. I just put it in it’s “greenest” mode and fired off my shots. The camera determined the ISO or film speed, the shutter, the white balance and the aperture that it felt best exposed the shot. I do get to frame the shot however I want to but it felt so hit or miss. If I was to get an awesome shot I felt so detached from actually taking the photograph that I felt I could never possibly create anything like it again.

Once I was forced to use almost manually settings on my camera to expose my subjects properly for a dark, but bright stage. I say almost manually because the camera is still determining my white balance for me, but I don’t plan on ever trying to manually set my white balance at a show. Seems nearly impossible with the lighting constantly changing in front of you and around you. You’re better off shooting RAW and determining how you want your photograph to look later in the post-production process.

I’m asked often if I believe it’s still photography if you shoot in RAW and do modifications later on the computer. I don’t see any reasons to not use every possible tool that you have at your disposal. Why not? So what if for majority of our art has been done where if you really messed up your exposure that you had to re-shoot, but now possibly in that situation you wouldn’t have to if you shot a digital photograph in RAW format. I shoot totally in the moment to get the exposure right so I don’t have to be hassled with tweaking my photographs after the fact, but that’s a lot of the fun for me. I just don’t see it as a handicap.

Another form of creative control that has shown up over the past years with digital photography is HDR or High Dynamic Range. Ever noticed that you have to make compromises when you shoot a photograph? Sometimes you can’t expose the whole photograph evenly? Here is where HDR comes in. You might have seen some overdone HDR images. It’s not always the case. Now you take multiple shots of different exposures of the exact same scene. So you usually end up with 3 shots (one underexposed, one properly exposed and another over exposed shot). With some special software you end up with one “dynamic” photograph that has what would have been under or over exposed, exposed beautifully!

When once manually setting my shutter and aperture was once such a pain for me, it’s become such a necessity and is becoming more and more natural as I do so. I’m rarely shooting with settings that the camera would have recommended and I love it.  My work is becoming more my own then ever, because I’m not relying on technology nearly as much. Don’t get me wrong the camera does an excellent job at picking settings, but it’s not nearly as predictable. If I’m shooting into the sun with my subject, the camera is going to overexpose my subject because majority of the frame is friggen bright. So, my subject will usually disappear, but if I pick the exposure so my subject is exposed correctly, she or he will be visible, while the background will wash out.

There are a number of things to keep in mind when shooting a show. It pays off to come prepared.

1. Stage Configuration – Do you get a photo pit? or are you like everyone else? Things are fairly self explanatory if you get to be in the photo pit, but if you are like everyone else you either need to get there early, get yourself to the front or get a fast telephoto lens.  It depends on how large of an area you have available if you’re going to be able to setup a tripod, shoot over the crowd and stand on something.
2. Lighting – Is there going to be enough available light just shoot? Hot-shoe flash can be a great investment, but it totally dependent on the venue. I have found if you shoot a concert with a regular flash it will illuminate all of the imperfections of the stage and all the dirt. You’re usually better off using the available light. You sometimes have no choice but to you use a hot-shoe flash if the venue doesn’t have lights that follow the band.
3. Your limitations – Some shows are going to have more laid back security. You might be able to get close on the side of the stage and shoot with a telephoto lens. Sometimes to get the shots I wanted to get I had to push the limit and go where I wasn’t permitted to get the right angle. Within reason, we don’t want to build a bad rep with the venue.