MPA alumnus John Lyons was the recipient of our 2022 Live Music Award with his striking image of David Mrakpor. Like most avid live music photographers, John has come across the problem of low lighting at gigs.
MPA alumnus John Lyons was the recipient of our 2022 Live Music Award with his striking image of David Mrakpor. Like most avid live music photographers, John has come across the problem of low lighting at gigs.
As much of my work is with jazz musicians, I do a lot of my photography in very small venues, often with very limited lighting. Over the last few years, I've developed my technique for dealing with this situation - adapting my approach when shooting and using post-processing to enhance the images.
Recently I was faced with the following situation, whilst shooting an intimate show by Ese and the Vooduu People in a small cellar bar. There was no stage lighting (indeed, there was no stage!) with the artists sat in the ambient light of the bar. To make matters worse, there was a small ceiling LED light (the kind you might find in the kitchen or bathroom of a modern house) immediately behind the head of Ese, which cast her face into complete shadow.
A few years ago, I would have probably left my cameras in the bag and just enjoyed the show but, having worked quite a lot recently in very low-light situations, I was determined to give it a go.
This blog is about how I managed to get from this situation:
to this outcome:
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My standard kit for gigs is 2 Sony A7R cameras with the following lenses:
As soon as I arrived, I realised it wasn't a venue to be juggling with two cameras, and also the zooms were not going to be anywhere near fast enough. I also decided that the intimate style of the performance would lend itself to close-up images and that the image quality would not be good enough to allow for much cropping in post-processing. Also, given the inevitability of a high degree of grain, I needed to get as close in as possible to retain detail.
So, I put the 135mm on my main camera, put the 85mm in my pocket, and everything else went back in the bag.
My 'go to' settings are 1/250sec at f2.8 on the zooms and f2.0 or 2.2 on the primes, adjusting ISO to suit the lighting. In this case, it was clear that I'd need to shoot wide open at the slowest possible shutter speed that avoided camera shake or motion blur in the subject. In this case, with the performers pretty static and a steady hand, I was able to get to 1/60sec with pretty good results.
From where I was sat, with the singer in profile, at f1.8 1/60sec, I needed ISO set to 32,000, which means lots of noise. Here's a crop of an unprocessed image showing the level of noise - brightening the image would obviously add more noise:
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Whilst I wanted some of these profile images and post-processing enabled me to recover a lot of the detail (more of which later), it was clear that I needed to get face on to the singer to get as much light as was available into the lens. I was fortunate enough at this gig to have the run of the room, so was able to discreetly move around and try a few angles. Most successful was across the room from the singer, shooting between the drummer and the back of the bass player. This enabled a face-on view of Ese, and a bit more light, albeit with some of the equipment between me and the subject. For these shots, I was able to drop ISO to 16,000, which gave me a little more flexibility in post-processing, though still way above the level I usually managed to shoot at (between ISO800 and ISO3,200).
The next issue I faced was that, whilst I was able to get a few autofocus shots of the drummer and bass player, the camera autofocus was struggling to find and remain locked onto Ese. I therefore decided to try reverting to Manual Focus - something I've never done before at a live gig. As she was seated, it was just about possible to make it work. With the low light, the image in the viewfinder was pretty grainy, so I focussed in on her mic, which was static and relatively bright, then adjusted out to focus on her lips. Rather than trying to refocus on the fly, I took shots at the moment her mouth was in the position where I had set the focus. A lot of trial and error but managed to get more hits than misses.
Here's a crop of an image before noise reduction applied, showing the focus on her lips, with the mic slightly soft:
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I use Lightroom for all my Post Processing. I find it responsive and easy to use and I've never been able to devote the time to get to grips with the complexity of Photoshop. My overall post-processing process could be the subject of a separate blog, but the key element to discuss here is Noise Reduction.
Historically, I've generally used manual noise reduction, applying a limited amount to the main subject and then selectively brushing more noise reduction into other areas that need it. However, that's very time-consuming and the automatic noise reduction in the latest version of Lightroom does an excellent job. It's important to get a balance between removing grain and avoiding the waxy effect with harsh edges that come with high levels of noise reduction. On these images, I set the denoise amount between 25 and 40 on each image.
Here's the same crop of the above image after all post-processing (including brightening) and noise reduction applied:
There's an element of 'waxiness' and an artefact on her cheek (which I then removed in the final edit) but, zoomed out, it looks fine:
... and finally, if you are faced with a low light situation, where noise is inevitable, one option is to embrace the issue, convert the noise to grain and make an artistic feature of it. Here's a crop from one of my images, with grain applied:
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A huge thank you to John for sharing this piece.