Music: RE: [u2tour] Photos from New Jersey

Nick, I'm sorry if my comments made you feel attacked. As a professional photographer who is constantly asked about my equipment as though buying the same will turn them overnight into the exact same photographer as I am, your comment (as well as others who ask Ayaz constantly), I guess rubbed me the wrong way, particularly the bit about "hell, they better be good." The equipment comparison, however, of a Polaroid and a pro-level DSLR is not accurate and not what I meant nor intended.

What I want people to understand is that if they had the same equipment as Ayaz, and used the equipment on auto, they would NOT get the same results.

Concert photography is not easy: lights are constantly changing, which means that exposures are constantly changing. You'd have to really understand the nuances of shadows and of highlights to make correct exposures. And further, you'd have to understand how aperture settings would affect everything from what was in focus to what wasn't (and even how it affects lights in the background), and then know how to change your ISO settings to accomodate your shutter speed. Photography is a lot more than just clicking a button and investing a couple thousand dollars into fancy equipment. You COULD get the same results from a Rebel as Ayaz gets from his 5Dii (other than some image degradation from the camera's poorer handling of noise--but that certainly wouldn't be something anyone without a developed eye would notice...) but you really have to know what you're doing, which means taking the camera off of auto and working with it in manual mode. I promise you that if you invested into the same sort of equipment that Ayaz has and kept the camera in auto, your images would be just the same as they are from the entry level DSLRs and higher-end point and shoots (I'd even argue that a person using a 5Dii on auto would probably wind up with even worse images since the 5Dii doesn't have a built in flash).

Above all, taking great concert photos means having invested quite a bit of time and practice into the art of photography: knowing what shutter speeds you can work at without focus issues, knowing how to work all of the settings on your camera (including focal points), knowing how different apertures affect your images (and how to properly focus using wider apertures), knowing how different lenses affect your images, knowing how to set ISOs to accomodate your desired shutter/aperture settings (and how the higher and in-between ISOs affect your final images), etc. Not to mention you need to have a good eye, understand composition, and know the right moment to press the shutter. These are not skills that are developed overnight, and buying expensive equipment is definitely not going to turn an unskilled photographer into an amazing one. It's knowing how to operate the equipment, understanding the nuances of particular camera settings, understanding how to creatively compose images, and how to develop them that does.

Finally, while some images will come out of the camera just fine, many images need proper post processing in Lightroom and/or Photoshop to work with color, highlight and shadow levels, contrast, cropping, etc. Black and white photography is a lot more than just desaturing color, too. For myself, a few hours were spent in Lightroom following the upload of my images tweaking the images to work with the aforementioned issues and to make them into the final images that I envisioned when I pressed the shutter.

I hope this clarifies my earlier comments; hopefully it also provides some insight for those who may be considering plunking down several thousand dollars into equipment that they don't need hoping to get the same results as Ayaz.

Peace,

Jen