How To Shoot
Live Events
The four main events are Fashion Shows,
Sporting Events, Live Musical Concerts and Construction. I will describe the complexities of photographing these events and show you how I have dealt with them.
Sporting Events, Live Musical Concerts and Construction. I will describe the complexities of photographing these events and show you how I have dealt with them.
Introduction
The four main events have one thing in common: the event sponsors create and control the lighting conditions. Consequently, you as a photographer have to "adapt."
Therefore, this website could have been titled "playing with the hand that you are dealt."
Light is the most critical component of photography. “The eye,” Plato understood, “is unusual among the sense organs in that it needs light in order to function.” A camera is a mechanical eye and therefore has the same needs: light.
The event sponsors control the intensity of light, (if any) its direction, its color, its quality and you have to adapt.
Getting early to the event to get your readings is important, as is your location. Access is a key ingredient in the photojournalist bag of tricks.
For how, when and where to get those precious tickets press here. It is an excellent article covering most of the avenues and venues available.
Your knowledge of fashion, sports, music or construction can work for or against you. For instance, you can get so immersed in the event that you overlook some essential factors. You may get so wrapped up in the outcome of a basketball game that you forget to press the shutter to get that memorable moment.
Anyone can cover a football game, but to be a good sports photographer it is essential to understand the game to able to anticipate that for instance on a “third and long, you can expect a pass” or if shooting baseball you should “expect a bunt with no outs, a man on first, trailing by one and a poor batter at the plate.”
In a jazz concert, you can get so engrossed on a solo rendition that you overlook other players. And so on.
To chronicle photographically a construction project, some knowledge of engineering concepts are useful but not essential.
One of the problems in trying to reach “white balance” is that in most live concerts and fashion shows the light source is intentionally the combination of multiple colors and one may predominate at one time and another color, the next time.
Now that I have spent some time describing the problems, let me devote some time addressing some of the solutions in the following sections, but before that, let me tell you a little bit about myself so that you can evaluate the source.
The four main events have one thing in common: the event sponsors create and control the lighting conditions. Consequently, you as a photographer have to "adapt."
Therefore, this website could have been titled "playing with the hand that you are dealt."
Light is the most critical component of photography. “The eye,” Plato understood, “is unusual among the sense organs in that it needs light in order to function.” A camera is a mechanical eye and therefore has the same needs: light.
The event sponsors control the intensity of light, (if any) its direction, its color, its quality and you have to adapt.
Getting early to the event to get your readings is important, as is your location. Access is a key ingredient in the photojournalist bag of tricks.
For how, when and where to get those precious tickets press here. It is an excellent article covering most of the avenues and venues available.
Your knowledge of fashion, sports, music or construction can work for or against you. For instance, you can get so immersed in the event that you overlook some essential factors. You may get so wrapped up in the outcome of a basketball game that you forget to press the shutter to get that memorable moment.
Anyone can cover a football game, but to be a good sports photographer it is essential to understand the game to able to anticipate that for instance on a “third and long, you can expect a pass” or if shooting baseball you should “expect a bunt with no outs, a man on first, trailing by one and a poor batter at the plate.”
In a jazz concert, you can get so engrossed on a solo rendition that you overlook other players. And so on.
To chronicle photographically a construction project, some knowledge of engineering concepts are useful but not essential.
One of the problems in trying to reach “white balance” is that in most live concerts and fashion shows the light source is intentionally the combination of multiple colors and one may predominate at one time and another color, the next time.
Now that I have spent some time describing the problems, let me devote some time addressing some of the solutions in the following sections, but before that, let me tell you a little bit about myself so that you can evaluate the source.