Tough Lighting Conditions

This series of pictures was taken under very difficult conditions with a 50 mm lens opened wide to F/1.8 (notice the very narrow depth of field). I used the exposure compensation control on my Nikon D80 to make sure that the automatic light meter didn’t try to overexpose them, as the lighting was dark and digital cameras will often flood naturally dark scenes to bring them up to “medium gray,” which can look unnatural in these kinds of settings. They felt a little dark when I viewed them so I used the Image>Auto Tone control in Photoshop CS4 to adjust to brighten up the lighting just a bit. Then I went to Image>Adjustments>Vibrance to enhance the colors to get richer tones without creating a false highlights. Concert pictures are always very tough –  an exposure compensation feature helps (darken them down by at least an f/stop) and don’t be afraid to play around with Photoshop.