Mayhem. Album.

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Some notes.

Mayhem's concert from 2017 was shot with Sigma 18-35 art. Due to the amount of stage fog and freaky lighting this combo refused to lock focus in either PDAF or CDAF. In some cases I had to resort to manual focusing with magnification and focus peaking in live view. Just as I mentioned in the previous threads, in these conditions it is close to impossible to tell if the subject is in focus : the stage smoke obscures details. Actually this is true for the rest of the concert shots presented here.
The second concert was shot using Sigma and FA 50 1.4. Using 50mm focal length on a crop camera in a tightly packed club without a photo pit was quite problematic. That club had a balcony and I had access to it. That's where I used the FA lens the most, The stage lights were the worse I have ever seen. The centre of the stage had some light, while the sides were almost unlit. Smoke screen, that's what it literally looked like at times, made photographing musicians on the sides of the stage almost impossible. You start focusing on a musician and while the camera is thinking how to do it, he moves and you have to start over again. Later I started pre-focusing on some spot and waited for the musician to appear there.

The Orange Goblin gig, was slightly easier to cover : the venue was bigger and I was familiar with it, more stage lights, a bit less stage smoke compared to the previous concerts. Just as in case with the previous gig I used two lenses (18-35 and 50). This time 50mm was quite useful, because the stage was much bigger. As there was no "three first songs" limit, closer to the end of the headliner's set I started experimenting by trying to capture some minor details with the 50mm lens. Some of these shots are in the album. I experienced exactly the same focusing issues with both lenses as was the case during the previous two shows.


The over hit rate was below 50% by my rough estimation. Most of the shots were done using CDAF (Live View), because I heavily rely on the electronic level and besides I wear glasses. 90% of shots were done using a wider angle than necessary to fit the subject into frame. That way I managed to maintain the perspective and got an opportunity to re-frame the shots to my liking in post processing. Working on these shots in post was a nightmare. To avoid motion blur, I used shutter speed around 1/160 and 1/250. Considering how dark it is inside most concert clubs, the ISO has to be kept around 3200. Occasionally I used 1600. Nowadays I try to avoid 6400, because I don't like the resulting look. Most of my shots are deliberately underxposed to preserve as much highlights as possible. My experience shows, that even at 3200 quite a lot of shadow details can be recovered. At 6400 there is not much left to recover. A lot of my images were pushed one or two stops in DxO Photolab (my raw converter of choice). To mitigate some of the issues associated with pushing severely underexposed images I had to resort to black and white conversion and resizing / resampling of images. I used DxO's Filmpack 5 for black and white conversion. The hardest part was to find the correct de-noising settings : too much and your image looks washed out, not enough and you see specks of noise and blotches of false colour all across the image. DxO's PRIME engine does miracles in some cases, while in the other cases, even when set to minimum, can be too strong, creating soft-looking images.DxO Filmpack has an option to emulate film grain. In certain cases it was useful to mask the digital noise.


One interesting observation : camera focusing speed varies depending on the colour of the stage lights. I did not figure out the exact patter, but I clearly noticed the difference in the focusing speed.



I hope that the next Pentax camera has an improved autofocus and performs considerably better at higher ISO. For the sake of experiment, I guess I should rent K-1 and 24-70, to see if it in anyway is a significant improvement in these fields.