Issues...

A while back i spotted that a band i liked were playing the Bristol Bierkeller (not my usual hangout, bet hey...) and noticed that on their website they were requesting photographs from people who had been to earlier gigs . Knowing that Mrs Acer wouldn't be too keen on going i thought i'ld try and get a pass to take photos - sent an email with a few photo examples - and got the blag :-)So last night i headed out with all the kit; 10-20mm canon superwide, a borrowed 17-40L (cheers Lee!), and the trusty kit 55-250mm IS canon. EX430ii flash along with transmitter, defusers and a few other cheeky flash related gadgets i wanted to try out. But on arriving and getting my pass i was told that it was the bands request that i only take photos for the first 3 songs and with no flash whatsoever. Groan...

So without my trusty flash i was left to work out what to do with 3 lenses that aren't particularly quick (f3.5-4, f4, and f4-5.6 respectively). My camera only goes up to iso1600 so although quick, not as quick as newer models and was no doubt going to give noisy images. It was pretty dark in there too so the only way i could get a workable shutterspeed was to push the exposure compensation to 2 stops under the meter reading.

So by doing everything i could to get my shutter-speed as quick as possible i experimented by taking a series of photos of the support band.

The above image i managed to grab by supporting the camera against the safety barrier in front of the stage which allowed me to get away with a fairly slow 1/40 shutter speed with the 17-40L. It wasn't fast enough for my liking so i decided to switch to the 55-250 which has Canon's image stabilisation system integrated within it...

This seemed to work much better, although IS can compensate for a bit of camera shake, it cant compensate for the subject you are shooting moving, ended up taking lots of frames and hoping for the best...

The main act came on and were great. Very energetic, great musicians, crowd very boisterous! Good fun. I managed to fire of around 150 shots during my allotment of the first 3 songs before being ushered out of the pit by a gnarley security dude who just couldn't wait to enforce his authority. Luckily for him, there were plenty of rowdy lads in there for him to get to work on later on in the evening. And out of the 150 shots i got about 4 decent ones...