Trey Songz “Angels With Heart” performance

As usual, I was only allowed to shoot the first 3 songs of the performance tonight.  That’s been standard for concert photography for well over 10 years.  It’s goes by pretty quickly, but the funny thing is, I’m utilizing 3 very different cameras in that brief period of time.

The workhorse is the Nikon D3s.  My favorite concert lens is the 17-35 but for this show 90% of my Nikon shots were with the 24-70mm.  I think the 70-200mm stayed  in my Domke waist pouch for the full 3 songs.  I shot about 400 shots with the Nikon.  Spray and Pray -that’s my motto…

I’m also doing the occasional shot with the Leica M9.  There’s no real reason to use the Leica other than the fact that I like shooting with it.  The Nikon is a superior concert camera in pretty much every way, but there’s something satisfying about using a camera that has retro styling and design but modern digital image capture.  I did about 30 performance shots with the M9 and 35mm Summicron.  Pretty much every one was out of focus with the exception of the last few where Trey had his back to the crowd.  Technically, the image is “off”, with a blue channel that is blown out.  And yet, it’s my favorite image of the night.

And finally, there’s the iPhone where I capture the Instagram/Twitter shot.  This is my least favorite way to capture an image.  Shooting with the iPhone has gotten better since we can now use an actual button (volume up) rather than touch the screen to capture an image.  However, since there’s no real way to adjust exposure, I tend to find shooting with the iPhone less satisfying than most people seem to find it but most of the time I’ll take a few seconds to capture something with the iPhone.