Pure Reason Revolution / Pallas - Rotherham 2006

Hi Folks,

What's that thing about long time lurker, first time poster ?

Anyway, stumbled across this forum while looking for some hints and tips on photographing gigs. Have been doing it myself off and on for about two years.

First got the bug at a Marillion gig in Manchester just after I'd bought myself a Fuji S5000 - got by with that (barely, as you'll see if you look at my smugmug gallery ) but at the start of this year I decided to upgrade to a Canon 350d as the ISO limit (800/1MP) on the Fuji was really starting to annoy me.

Have just grabbed myself a 50mm 1.8 lens for my birthday but haven't had a chance to use it 'live' yet.

Attached a couple of my piccys below, please feel free to rip them to shreds

They're both from the same show, the first is an amazing up and coming UK progressive rock band called Pure Reason Revolution who've just released their first album. The second is another UK prog band called Pallas who are from my adopted home town of Aberdeen, Scotland - I run their official mailing list so I tend to take the odd photo of them when I get the chance. I shot all these with the kit lens that came with the Canon in full manual (I think !) - 1/60th and 1/80th shutter speed anyway.

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They are a tad dark. In the first I would crop out that blue triangle thingie. In general you should have space in front of the subject so that they have room to "look out of" the image ... both of these have space on the "wrong" side. You seem to have done well with your timing of the captures.

Thanks so much for that, it's much appreciated and just the sort of constructive criticism I was looking for.

The darkness is probably my own fault as it's been done when fiddling with the RAW images and I really need to calibrate my monitor properly. I would never have thought of leaving space at the front in a million years - will definitely put that one into practice next time.

So it should be more like this (can't fix the brightness at the mo, am at work) - I can see your point !

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Oh, yes, much better on the crop, both blue triangle and space. After a while of shooting these you will start seeing this in the viewfinder automatically while composing the rest of the image. Let me also suggest that you shoot A LOT at concerts. It never hurts to have too many images. I often shoot 500-700 during "first three songs" and throw out most with only about twenty unique keepers (many dupicates because of how I shoot.) And welcome to POTN.