New York Music Photographer Chris Owyoung - The Best Music Photography & Band Portraits » tutorial

How to Take the World's Best Concert Photos

chris — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:59:05 +0000

July 13, 2009 – The wait is over. My concert photography article is now live over on the PhotoShelter blog. The article is part of their new LEARN series (a totally sick collection of business resources for photographers).

Thank you to everyone who submitted topics for the piece on my previous post and on twitter. Even at 7-pages and 3,300 words, the article still doesn’t cover everything that you all asked for and that I wanted. I’ll be writing about everything I left out in the weeks to come. In case the article creates more questions than it answers, drop me a line over on my contact page.

MetaSmart Seminars: Protect your work, make money

chris — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:30:06 +0000

T-Pain performs at Hot 97 Summer Jam, in East Rutherford New Jersey. July 1, 2008

June 23, 2009 – The New York installment of METAsmart, was a huge success. The seminar series, which teaches photographers how meta data can be used to protect copyright, streamline workflow and increase sales, featured presentations by metadata expert David Riecks, Photoshelter founder & SEO expert Allen Murabayashi, and a panel discussion by meta-savvy photographers Lou Manna, Garfield Hall and yours truly.

The presentations were so good that even I learned a lot (and I was on the panel).

DID YOU KNOW

Google returns 140 characters of your page description before cutting it off.
Google does include the ALT tags of images in search results but will not read the image metadata.
The copyright symbol does not display correctly in all photo captioning software. Write out “copyright” instead.
Including the original file name in the metadata can help you determine which image the client has even if they’ve renamed it.
It is illegal to remove the copyright information from a photo’s metadata.

IF YOU MISSED THE NEW YORK SEMINAR

Don’t worry, the METAsmart program notes and a host of other useful information will be downloadable from photometadata.org soon.
Registering for one of the upcoming FREE METAsmart seminars in Washington D.C. or Atlanta.

I ALSO RECOMMEND

Improving your website’s SEO by downloading the Photoshelter SEO Cookbook for Photographers.
Visiting David Riecks’ Controlled Vocabulary website for more information on how to efficiently keyword your images no matter what software you’re using.

What have you learned about metadata?

Protect your hearing, a pubic service announcement

Your Concert Photography Tutorial

chris — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:41:38 +0000

June 4, 2009 – So, I’m writing a concert photography tutorial for a guest-blogger spot on the awesomeness that is the Photoshelter Blog. (If you don’t read it already, you should.) I’ll be covering the necessary how-to topics like gear and shooting technique but I’d love to know what else you would like covered in a concert photography guide. Would you like to know more about workflow or post processing? All suggestion are welcome!

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who contributed topics here and via twitter.

The potential topics include:

PR Contacts: How to Find Them
Festivals: Who to Shoot, How to Survive and Still Come out with Great Images
Doing the Work: How to Create Iconic Music Images while Keeping the Publicist Happy
Getting into it Concert Photography (Starting from the Bottom)
Equipment: What to Use and Why it matters
Workflow: I just took 300 photos in 15 minutes, now what?
Make it Look Good, Small: Post Processing Techniques for the Web
Money: Where to spend it and even how to make it
Primes vs. Zooms: When to use each and Why
Critical Focusing: Beware the microphone/stand
First Three, No Flash: How to work with the Rules and when to Break them
To Flash or Not to Flash: That is the Question
Change Locations: How to Decide your next Shot and Where you Need to be to Get it.

Get creative with Flash Zoom

chris — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:25:40 +0000

05.14.09 – Most external flash units like the Canon 580 EX and the Nikon SB-900 have the ability to move the flash head forward and backward effectively zooming the flash. In normal situations having a flash zoom setting that matches the focal length on your lens is ideal. (When the settings match, the flash spreads the light over as much of the frame as possible.)

In some instances you might want to set the flash zoom to a longer focal length than your lens. This will darken the corners of the photo and enhance anything in the center of the frame.The Canon 580 EX II has a zoom range of 24mm – 105mm. The Nikon SB-900 has range of 12mm – 200mm.

For the most powerful output, speedlights should be set to the maximum zoom when using lighting modifiers like softboxes and umbrellas. For a largest light source possible, make sure the zoom setting on the speedlight is wide enough to cover the entire surface of the modifier.

The Energy

Chris Owyoung — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:14:53 +0000

March 28, 2009 – Last month, The Owyoung Brothers caught up with the guys from The Energy for a run-and-gun portrait session right before their sold-out show at The Fillmore at Irving Plaza. Here are some of the shots.

Photographer’s Notes

A combination of five Nikon speedlight flashes were used for this setup: four remote SB-600s controlled by a single on-camera SB-900 in commander mode. This is Nikon’s CLS system in full effect.

Since we had all of 15 minutes of shooting time, all of the shots used the same lighting configuration:

Two bare SB-600s as backlights
One SB-600 bounced into a 45″ reflective umbrella camera left (fill)
One SB-600 shot into a 15″ Lastolite EZYbox Softbox on boom high camera right (key)

The position (height )of the EZYbox gave the images the dramatic shadows need to fit the setting while the modifier itself enlarged the light coming SB-600 enough to soften it significantly. The EZYbox was mounted on a monpod and held very close to the subject – just barely out of frame. The closer and larger the source, the softer the light.

For more examples of the EZYbox in action, check out Todd’s portraits of Dragonforce.

End Notes

A huge thanks goes out to The Energy (Adam, Ian, James and Zack) for putting up with us while we barked orders for 15 minutes straight.

Concert Photography Questions & Answers

Chris Owyoung — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:02:46 +0000

Leave your concert photography questions as a comment and I’ll do my best to answer, no strings attached. Please indicate if you would like my response to be public or private.

*EDIT* – Please skim the comments to see if your question has already been answered!

Best,

Chris