I had heard about it on episode 601 of the Shop Talk Show and bought my ticket right away. Putting together all of these people who’s books and blogs I’ve been reading, and podcasts I’ve listened to for almost two decades, in one place, only a few hours away, was an incredible thing. I can’t remember anything else like this in the web development community and I don’t know the next time something this big will happen again.

Having spent some time photographing events for The A Cappella Blog I thought it might be fun to bring my camera gear down to capture this event for posterity. From my experience I know that some bands have rules around when and how you can shoot their shows, as well as venues sometimes have rules around where you can go to take photos or what you can and cannot include in your photos. So I reached out to Brad via email asking if it would be okay to bring my gear down and if I could have access to places like the backstage and the balconies. While I thought that worst case I would just go to the show and enjoy it as part of the audience, I was surprised and thrilled to get an enthusiastic “YES!” in response.

With that I made it a goal to capture some of the fun moments of the night and to get at least one good shot of each person performing. I'm happy with how the photos turned out and throughout this page you’ll see some of my favorite shots from the night—along with a few photos from the night before.

Preparing for the Gig

Before heading down to Pittsburgh I put together a solid set of lenses and gear (backup batteries, memory cards, lens cleaning kits, etc...) as well as a few backup items that I wasn’t sure I'd need, like battery-powered LEDs and a tripod.

It’s been a while since I've shot photos during an event like this so I wanted to do a little YouTube research on concert photography and I picked up on a couple of tricks and camera settings that I tried throughout the event. One of them was around metering modes and using spot metering. When I've shot events like this in the past I usually will leave metering on the matrix metering mode (in Nikon parlance), but this can sometimes lead to lots of extra noise and an increased auto-ISO from the huge differences between stage lights and the dark background behind the performers.

I moved the metering selector to one of my camera’s function buttons so I could quickly swap between matrix metering and spot metering. My other function button was set to focus modes and throughout the entire show I wound up switching both of these settings frequently as I moved around the venue and changed lenses.

Another tip I got was to use Manual mode and set the aperture wide open, set the camera to auto-ISO, and the shutter speed to 1/200 or 1/250. I've done something like this for past shows, but I would try to stick to a shutter speed of 1/160 or something slower to get more light in. I moved my setting to 1/250 for almost the whole show and I'm glad I did. Details like hair moving, drum sticks swinging, and other movement were mostly frozen and I think it made a huge difference in some shots. The tradeoff for this was higher ISO and more noise, but I think spot metering helped keep that down where it could.

Finally, I capped the auto-ISO at either 8000 or 6400 throughout the night. There are a few shots where this was an issue and the noise is very obvious, but for the most part exposures were where I wanted them to be and those that were underexposed still got enough detail to balance things out.

Fin

I came to this show as a fan of the web developers that I've learned from and that have made a huge impact on my career and how I approach my work. But for one weekend these folks weren’t developers talking shop; they were musicians and a group of people looking to celebrate being together and to share their talents with the crowd. Brad and all of the folks I met were kind and welcoming throughout the entire weekend and Brad answered all of my questions that came up along the way—making it really easy to just show up and go with the flow.

One thing that’s not to be overlooked is that this whole event was for the benefit of two different charities, Project Healthy Minds and NextStep Pittsburgh. Right before hitting the road one of my friends was managing a mental health crisis in his life, so that made this event hit home even more for me. Please take care of each other and—as Brad started off the concert—we all need to take some time to notice the negative and get it out.

To Brad and all of the other folks I met this weekend, thank you and keep rocking!

Unless it's very specific for the look of the photo, I typically set the ISO to use AUTO-ISO, which essentially lets the camera decide what ISO setting is best for the shot. Nikon lets you set a base setting and a maximum setting, however, for the D500 I don't think I had set it to a specific maximum ISO, because in my library I saw shots that went all the way up to 40000.

When I got my current camera, the Nikon Z 7ii, I had left on a lot of the noise reduction settings (that blur out the noise in camera) and I had set the maximum AUTO-ISO for each of my three user settings to go no higher than 2000 or 4000.

I've noticed that when taking photos in situations where I'd expect the ISO to go way up that one of two things happen. Either the noise reduction does its thing and the image looks a little blurry, or if in a situation where I'm shooting Aperture Priority (where the shutter speed is automatically set to work with a fixed aperture setting) the shutter speed goes so low that the image is blurry or at least some detail is lost.

Wherever possible I've been trying to avoid any noticeable noise, but looking at my past vacation photos I think letting there be noise was the reason why I got a decent shot in the first place.

As I've heard from other photographers, you can use technology to remove noise and you can spend all day tweaking exposure, but removing motion blur is a much tricker thing to do later on.

So I decided to take my one user setting that I typically use to take photos of my kids or other moving subjects and I cranked the maximum AUTO-ISO to 25000 and turned off the in-camera noise reduction, then took a few random shots around the house.

In this low-light shot of my cat you can see a lot of noise, but also things like her whiskers or the fur on her ears aren't blurry from movement. I might continue to tweak these settings, but I'm leaning towards keeping this look. Over the next couple of weeks I'll focus more on low-light shooting to see how well this pans out. I’ll bet some photos in otherwise decent light don’t change, but I'll also keep an eye on that too. For now I’m willing to embrace the noise.