Performance Photography (or wildlife photography)

One of the things I do with my time is photograph musicians performing. Sometimes this is friends and their bands (especially Capo Creek), but other performances are of classical music - often small orchestras, or chamber ensembles.

Last Sunday, as I photographed a piano recital, I realised something.

Photographing a musician is much like photographing wildlife.

I need to concentrate on the pianist's behaviours, and try to predict his actions, much in the same way I do when I'm photographing birds ... I'd never really thought about this before. Today's recital was all music I am unfamiliar with, so I didn't know how the pianist was likely to move. But as I watched I recognised patterns in the music, which were often reflected in his hand movements, making it much easier for me to capture some of the more dramatic moments of the performance.

I also need to think carefully about shutter speed - freeze the motion, or show the speed of the musician's hands with a slower shutter speed.

And of course there is the lighting, which is absolutely out of my control. Sometimes I have strongly backlit subjects; sometimes there is barely any light on my subjects at all. So I'm often working with ISO settings and having to mess around in post to minimise noise.

Pianist Arnan Wiesel performing at the Wesley Music Centre in Canberra

This is one of the images I captured after realising that the pianist repeated certain movements. The first time he gestured like this, I missed the shot. But then the music repeated, and he repeated the movement, which I could anticipate and capture.

Forgot to mention the problems of not getting audience heads in the way in some venues - it's a bit like stray branches in bird photos. All I can do is try to make them as inconspicuous as possible.