Working hard on my band photography, seeing as how I seem to pick up a reasonably good and consistent seat every couple weeks. This is Chanpan, consisting of Grace Dumdaw and Lance and Matthew Tran.
Thanks for seeing my work!
That lighting seems really difficult to work with
Someone just posted a link to this Wikipedia article on a different Lemmy post yesterday:
I leaned into it. But yeah, the lights didn’t change colors even once, and I ended up seeing a lot of odd blue/orange artifacting at times.
Makes for a surreal effect that is hard to look away from though. Incredibly interesting stuff
Love chanpan, especially love how they use a lot of jungle and breakbeat samples in their instrumentals. Recommend Jesus in China
One thing I notice is the quick transition from one color to another, like on the drummer’s nose. If you’re shooting RAW, in your photo editing app while you are developing, try switching up the color space. It can have a dramatic effect on how transitions between colors look, and can make a huge difference in what the image looks like. Aside from extreme lighting like this, it’s also great for flowers.
That’s concert photography though. Concerts have harsh direct light that gives harsh shadows. Better lighting is what gives you great results, not editing tricks.
“Tricks” are actually very important in LED lights situations. Dealing with out of gamut colours is critical, it’s not about shadows harsh or not.
Photography is all about the lighting. Saying shadows dont matter is an out of touch statement. Could OP have used some tricks, sure. However the lighting designer could have done a lot better.
Shadows are not the subject here, at all. The main problem here is the highly saturated colours coming from the led lighting causing strange, let’s say, solarization effect. It is distracting. To avoid this you need to be aware of keeping your colours in gamut. I’m not a expert in this domain but usually you have to pay attention to your colour space and desaturate and/or rotate your colours.
Sure, but your missing how camera sensors react to saturation. Exposure and saturation go hand in hand. What you see here is the blue channel being so bright that it’s over exposing that color channel. You could fix that by under exposing the image, but then you’ve thrown away all the detail in the shadows. You can’t just magically recover an over exposed image by changing your color gamut. You have to have the detail in the first place which doesn’t appear to be the case in OP’s image. Simply desaturating the color in post doesn’t change its exposure. You could lower the luminance for that color channel but again it wont bring back detail. Also, simply rotating colors won’t do anything to fix clipping. I’ve run into this issue a ton with my own concert photography and the best solution is to just put white light on the subject to reduce the dynamic range.
Edit: OP stated the camera is an iPhone 17. Good luck getting the results you’re expecting with that. OP also said the lights were static and unchanging. This is probably worst case scenario for this setup. OP did the best with what they had.
You could fix that by under exposing the image, but then you’ve thrown away all the detail in the shadows.
HDR and/or multi shot blending solve this, we are talking digital.
For what it’s worth, you’re both right, but there is no lighting designer here, this is a small venue hall not focused on photography but on mood. Tricks are all you can do here.
It’s Polaris Hall! It’s small enough that my janky ass is the only one with an ADA seat, but since its head up front and slightly to the right, I have one of the best vantage points for photography.
No, I’m not missing anything you say. Even if you under expose the blue channel will clip anyway. That is why there are fantastic tools (like those proposed in darktable for example) to deal with it : rotation of colours, desaturation and roll-offs to make nice transitions to white for the highlights. I mean I’m not talking out of my ass there is this great video that I shared just above.
Since I did my work in raw, I can prolly do the edits you’re requesting, but I posted the work I wanted to post. Sometimes the point of harsh light is to use harsh light. I do what I can with what I’ve got, and I made the choice to lean into the concert lighting.
You did great! Focus on framing and timing your shots then learn the technical details as you go. Don’t worry about some random criticism on the internet
It’s not an editing trick. I’d bet any amount of money that the drummer’s nose didn’t look like that in real life. Since that’s true, there is a range of photo techniques that can be used that spans between that unrealistic image, and what the scene looked like in real life.
To put it anther way, these photos are not as good as they possibly could be. They definitely could more accurately capture what the light actually looked like. Shooting raw and selecting the camera’s native color space will close the gap between this image and what reality looked like.
I did what I could with the equipment I was allowed to bring into the venue. I apologize that I’ve let you down with these pictures. However, I’ve brought the best camera I could bring into the venue, without being the designated concert photographer.
I’m not saying they’re bad, they’re great. Keep up the great work, and keep learning how to hone your skills.
Also, shoot in raw whenever you can.
OP stated the camera was an iPhone 17. This explains the saturation and low dynamic range. Would a human eye see more detail in things like the nose, certainly yes. However, small phone camera sensors cannot deal with the huge dynamic range in concert settings like this. That’s why they use all the “tricks” you’re referring to but clearly that didn’t work here.
Looking good.
If anyone’s as curious as I was: https://chanpanmusic.com/
(Note that the video that autoplays in the background is slightly NSFW.)
They sound fun, and they’re on streaming services (at least, Apple Music), so I’m gonna have a listen up there. I care a lot more about music than I do about photography… though, that’s more to do with me sucking at the latter than not appreciating what others do, which I definitely do. But yes, as someone already said, stage lighting at concerts can be very hostile toward equipment. I figure it’s either going to be too dark, or it’s going to put the light in a place that looks good to fans but isn’t conductive to good shots.
What kind of camera are you using? I see a lot of venues prohibit cameras with interchangeable lenses
Yup, that’s prohibited here too. I’m using an iPhone 17 Pro Max with an app called ProShot, which lets me shoot in raw and with manual settings. It’s as close as I can get to my usual kit that the venue will allow.
As a complete amateur who’s had a few DSLRs and still knows very little, I think the concert lighting is a cool effect and really creates a vibe. It’s photos like this that made me want to go to live shows when I was younger because they looked so much cooler than my life.
These shots could have easily been in a Spin magazine article on the band in the late 90s/early 00s.
