Six rules for shooting live

It will be a big challenge to capture any form of live performance, including indoor and outdoor. This is not only because we need to master various shooting principles before shooting, but more importantly, we are usually restricted to our seats and cannot move around to find the shooting angle we want. However, these are not the most challenging aspects. Poor lighting conditions for indoor performances are our biggest enemy. Below, photographer Kav Dadfar will help you better complete the shooting of live performances from six aspects.

1. Be a polite person

No matter whether our shooting environment is indoors or outdoors, the first thing we need to pay attention to is to be courteous and courteous to others, and give full consideration to the performers feelings with the audience. If you're photographing a street performance, you'll likely have the opportunity to get up close and personal with the performer before the show starts, so take the time to have a general chat with him. Not only is this done to make the performer more relaxed, but it's also basic etiquette. In addition, please remember that the performer is not just for you, so we should try to avoid or reduce the interference to the audience when shooting in front of the crowd. Finally, when we finish shooting and prepare to leave, don’t forget to leave the artist’s email and send him the works we shot.

2. Be fully prepared

This may seem like an obvious principle, but I still have to stress that we need to be prepared to shoot any performance under any conditions. What I mean is don’t forget to turn on your camera, have the correct camera settings, and then have the right lens ready so we don’t miss any great shots. Before shooting, you can try to predict what will happen next. You know, usually every performance will have a climax, and we need to be prepared for the climax moment.

3. Plan the shooting speed

The most important element when shooting a performance is the control of speed. By changing the shooting speed, we can not only capture sharp and clear images, but also create motion blur if necessary. Of course, this blur does not come from the shake of the camera itself. Therefore, setting the appropriate shutter speed is an essential part.

For high-speed motion performance categories, if we want to freeze the dynamic scene, we may need to use a larger aperture value to ensure that the shutter speed is enough to make the image details appear. But before you open the aperture wide open, keep in mind: the wider the aperture, the shallower the depth of field and the blurrier the background. Therefore, how many shutter speeds we need depends on the moving speed of our subject and your own shooting intentions (assuming you want a motion blur effect). Normally, if we want to completely freeze the dynamic picture, the camera shutter speed needs to be set higher than 1/200 second. In addition, the camera's high-speed continuous shooting mode is a great auxiliary tool, you can take a series of photos continuously and then select the clearest one.

4. Increase the ISO value

In some usage scenarios (especially indoors), we need to increase the ISO sensitivity setting of the camera so that we can shoot at high speed. Get faster shutter speeds with moving targets. The ISO setting value depends on the lighting conditions and whether you have a pair of "iron hands". Most of the time, I won't shoot with a shutter speed lower than 1/60 second, and my starting ISO will be between 400 and 800. Before shooting, we need to fully understand the camera's capabilities at different ISO settings, because different cameras have different noise suppression capabilities. We can try more before shooting to have a good idea of ??the camera's image quality under high ISO.

5. Avoid using flash

I believe that using flash to shoot is an offensive behavior for both the performer and the audience. This is because Flash will kill the entire performance atmosphere, also because the flash will make the original rich colors become dull. So, we want to avoid using flash and instead choose to rely on the real light in the scene. For example, if the performer is in the shadow when shooting outdoors, we can choose to press the shutter when he enters the sun; if the performer is on an indoor stage, we have to wait until the spotlight hits the performer. Take photos again when the light is brighter or on your body.