We do some concert/event shooting at work from time to time, and for our latest assignment I decided to give my new Canon 7D a go. At Lydverkets latest broadcast I packed the 7D and the Canon 17-55 f/2.8 IS and used it the whole evening (at f/2.8). The performing band was deLillos, a legendary quirky rock band that’s been playing since the 80’s.
All photos have been resized and have some pp done in Lightroom, very little if any noise reduction. I shot the event in JPGs with standard noise reduction.
The lighting was difficult, with lots of red ambient/spotlights and LED backlights. I had to keep the ISO between 2000 and maximum 5000 to keep my shutter speed up.
The variable lights made it hard to get consistant exposures (maybe some bracketing shooting would be cool?). But both over- and underexposed shots were possible to tweak to a certain degree.
All in all I found the 7D to be a good lowlight event camera. The autofocus is just kick-ass. I think I had less than 5 photos out of focus out of about 200! ISO performance is great and detail is good. Some photos, especially high ISO shots that were a bit off exposurewise were difficult to rescue. I’d reckon the 5DMk2 would have some more leverage here. But shooting in RAW would probably be beneficial if I’ve had the time to postprocess properly.
The Canon 17-55 IS lens is great for this kind of stuff. At low shutter speeds the stabilization really works well and is very welcome for low light stuff. The reach is a bit short for a concert lens though. Next time I’ll take the 70-200 f/2.8 IS, even if it might prove to be a bit long.
You can watch the whole set at flickr here. You can also see the EXIF info for each photo.