I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to get rid of the red-light saturation you can see in past gig photos (examples here and here). Red lamps confuse the light meters and often result in me shifting half the shoot into monochrome and I was pretty sure that the lens I hired for the Paleday gig hadn’t resulted in such bad photos, so I was a bit confused.

Googling for a solution I found a couple of articles suggesting that UV filters could interfere with the colouring – bingo, that was the difference between the hired lens and this one, I’d added a UV filter. So off that came. Another suggestion involved forcing the camera to use tungsten settings: an excellent idea, the AWB on the 30D was probably getting confused.

I also discovered Steve Mirarchi’s tutorial on concert photography – it’s written from a film standpoint but I was sure many of the principles would apply. It’s a fab tutorial and I observed some of the practices, previously I’d been using 1/60 as a slowest shutter speed but cranked that up slightly and the difference was noticeable. I also decided to ignore the viewscreen when checking photos – because of the lighting, stuff looks out of focus on the LCD but is actually pretty accurate.

The fruits of the camera/lens tweaking are here (with a good single-photo example here) courtesy of Harry’s Bar yesterday with the f1.2 85mm. Later photos have more tweaks and changes applied, which have made a lot of difference to the shoot. Nothing there is fiddled with on Photoshop, it’s all JPEG as the camera chucked it out. Woohoo!