Hi all,

Last night I had my first go ever at concert photography at the Gent Jazz Festival in Belgium, with Melody Gardot and Jamie Cullum...

I was standing in the crowd, about 5m from the stage, armed simply with my K10D and a Pentax M 50/2 lens. This morning I've been going through my pics in LR, throwing out over 90%, and doing some very basic editing, mainly cropping and straightening.
I've included some results here, more can be found at Picasa:

Picasa-webalbums - pieter.missiaen - Gent Jazz

Any comments and critiques would be highly appreciated, both on shooting and on postprocessing!
Thx, Pieter

[Irek J.]

It looks like you did your best with what you had. A 70-100mm would work here and would have helped you fill the frame more and avoid cropping. Your shots are good, IMO, but could use some better composition. I'm new to this as well but I noticed that the best approach is 'less is better' so I concentrate on getting every shot right. Capturing the moment means patience, and it's actually more rewarding later on when you process your pictures. Keep shooting as I'm sure you'll better your efficiency next time around.

Zenfolio | Irek J. | On The Stage - Sunfest 09

[sfdealer]

I'm a fan of the two piano-related ones. Especially the second. Nice colors. Definitely caught some expressive moments.

Tough to tighten up the frame enough to keep the stage lights out.

I'm interested in taking the same shots. Might be time to look for a 135mm. Seems I'll have to be right up in the performer's face with my 50mm.

[Pieter M]

As for my lens choice: I wanted to bring only one small lens, and chose the M 50/2 as it was the smallest, lightest and fastest lens I have, and offered me a challenging learning opportunity.
I knew beforehand that something longer than 50mm would have been better, but the only longer glass I had available was the 50-200mm kit, which I decided not to take because of its much slower apertures. I didn't want to bring my DA* 16-50 mainly because of its size and weight.

I know that the compositions are far from perfect, but standing in a dense crowd on shaking floorboards trying to frame a very energetic performer didn't give me much choices.
I did crop almost all of my images, mostly at the bottom to leave the heads out of the people who were in front of me, and sometimes also at the sides to leave out the people walking on stage to film the performers. I generally tried to keep at least part of the stage lights in, as I felt they add to the mood of the images

I do notice that most pictures aren't as sharp as I would like them, but I don't really know if they are unsharp because of low shutterspeed (1/25s to 1/60s) or because of my bad manual focussing skills at small DOFs (F/2.8 or F/3.5). Maybe somebody could enlighten me on this?