Concert photography with your X100

I always have a camera with me (at least my smartphone) and I took my X100s to a "the rifles" concert yesterday in Hamburg. The light was very dim and the room was small and packed with people from door to stage. The X100s has only a 23mm lens and I was standing in the sixth row. The challenge in this situation is to capture not only the artists on stage. In such a narrow space you can also create very close images to capture the magic of the moment. I set my cam to an ISO value of 6400 and a shutter speed of 125 of a second. And then I just fired away. I did not care about the results.

When you shot low light and very high ISO the images become a bit blurry and grainy, but bear in mind that no one looks at photos in a hundred percent view. The contents of the photo are important, not the quality. This is not fine art photography! The photo above was shot with wide open eyes at f 2.0 to add some depth from the crowd to the stage. The light from the right creates a great mood and the audience becomes a part of the whole thing showing how dense this place was. I also love the hat of the guy in the right on stage. It is a visual anchor in the whole image.

Motion blur is also great to create some movement and emotion. It is not always a sign of bad photogrpahy. This guy was touched by the music clapping his hands.

In my conclusion a fixed lens camera like a X100s is a good companion for concerts. You have to move and you can't do the same stuff like with a telephoto lens, but if you try to do more reportage style photos the results can reflect the emotions at and around the stage. The limiting factor of this camera can be a huge advantage.

"We believe in limited resources, don't we? Absolutely. I'm dead keen on limiting resources." - (Delia Derbyshire)
Cheers,

Nils