Accordian Player

It’s perfectly possible to make some great photographs from a very average compact camera, but it is true to say that you boost your chances of getting good images in non-ideal lighting conditions by having a more sophisticated camera.  That may be a higher-end compact (the Canon G9/10/11 range of cameras comes to mind) or anything from an entry-level SLR up to a professional grade camera.  And to some extent, as the camera gets more sophisticated, it’s ability to create good images in non-ideal light improves at the same rate.

As an example take this shot, taken at Kinsale Arts Week earlier this year when Slovenian band Terrafolk played an outdoor gig in Charlesfort, with a special guest appearance by my sister, Una.

I’ve been meaning to process these images for quite a while, and apart from a handful have yet to do so.  One reason is that the light available at the venue was a challenge from a photographer’s point of view.  I don’t do much in the way of gig photography (apart from maybe with my phone camera at a U2 gig), but I imagine this is a common issue at concerts.  For instance, I had reasonably good access to the band and the stage prior to the Terrafolk concert in Kinsale, and you might think there was an opportunity for me to put some off-camera flashes on the stage to improve the lighting for the images I was to shoot.  But in scenarios like this, the stage lighting has to take precedence and in general photographers have to work with this lighting, rather than adding their own.

Looking at the technical details of this particular shot, you get a hint of some of the challenges that arose when photographing the gig. Firstly I needed to use a relatively long lens to get tight crops of the various artists on the stage, and that in turn required me to have shutter speeds in the order of 1/200s.  With the lighting on the stage, even at a wide aperture, I had to push the ISO up to 2000 to get a decent exposure.

Had I being using a compact camera, or even an entry level digital SLR such as the Nikon D50 that I owned prior to my current D300, I doubt I would have come away with anything usable from the concert, because those cameras just aren’t capable of producing clean, sharp files under those lighting conditions.

As it is, the D300 is just about at its limit with this exposure, and if I wanted to do much with this shot apart from just blog it, I would likely have to do a considerable amount of post-processing to remove noise and clean up the shot.  Given this you might begin to understand, with a couple of hundred shots on file from this concert, why I have yet to dive head first into that task.  It’s one for one of those cold dark winter nights we’re sure to have soon, now that the clocks have gone back.