Further Lessons In Composition & Focus

Further Lessons In Composition & Focus

By William Lulow

If you follow this blog at all, you know that I am often asked to photograph musicians in concert at various venues. Certainly, digital photography makes this much easier than when I had to shoot them on film. First, digital sensors are way more sensitive than film ever was. I can remember “pushing” Kodak Tri-X film to the old ASA 1600 to get a couple more stops from my exposures. I remember using my old Nikkor 200mm f/4 lens wide open with a shutter speed of around 1/60th to 1/100th of a second to get some great shots of Chuck Berry, Rod Stewart, Elton John and Judy Collins. These days, ISO settings of 2000 or 2500 are not uncommon and you can even “push” sensors to ISOs in the 5000 range. But whenever you are using such extreme underexposures you give something up in the clarity of the image.

All of this technical stuff only matters when you are trying to achieve good focus on the performer. However, when you have more than one performer up there, you begin to be presented with some choices. If there isn’t much light and you have to shoot with your aperture wide open or close to it, you also begin to give up something in focus. If you can get a good exposure at f/3.5 say, that probably won’t be sufficient to have both performers (if it’s a duo) in sharp focus at the same time. There are many scientific principles of lens construction at work here preventing you from focusing on two objects at the same time. Most lenses can’t pull that off anyway.

So, here are a couple of points worth considering when you are faced with this situation. Lenses will provide much greater depth-of-field (thus being able to focus on two performers at the same time), the more they are stopped down. So, an aperture of f/8 will allow you to focus on two performers. The problem is that under low light conditions, as in a club venue, you are hard pressed to use an aperture of f/8 and still capture some movement. Wide angle lenses will also increase your depth-of-field, but might not get you a large enough image.

With a still life subject, small apertures don’t present a problem because the camera can be placed on a tripod and the shutter can be slowed down to several seconds, if necessary, to compensate for the small lens opening. (Remember the “triangle of exposure: ISO setting, aperture and shutter speed) These three control your exposure.

In a concert venue, you don’t have this luxury. So, what can you do? I was presented with this problem recently while covering a concert. Here was the duo:

You can see how far apart the performers were from one another. This makes for a very static composition and one that usually won’t work for any kind of publicity photo. But, since both performers are on the same plane, relative to the camera, they are both in sharp focus. One of the solutions I have always used in these situations is to position the camera off to one side in order to get both performers in the frame. Here is an example:

The problem here is that, again, given the physical distance between both performers, you would still need to use a small enough aperture to increase the depth-of-field to incorporate both people. This particular image was exposed for 1/100^th of a second at f/5 with an ISO setting of 2000. That was pretty good for this situation. Camera was afforded some additional stability with the use of a monopod.

One other thing you can do here is to be patient and wait for a time when both performers are closer together. Here is such an occasion:

Here, the sharpness on both performers is acceptable. They are still not on the same plane physically, but they are close enough to make a decent exposure and the composition is way better.

I made quite a few exposures from directly in front of the stage where both performers were on the same physical plane and therefore were both in perfect focus, but the ones I made from the side were more effective compositions where their heads were in juxtaposition to each other.