On Photographing Punk Musicians – Part 3

Recently, I published my latest zine, How To Photograph Punk Musicians In 5 Easy Steps. This newsletter contains a chapter of that zine, with more to follow. If you like it, please consider buying a physical copy at store.terror.management.

I also have copies left of my earlier zine, Terror Management, containing edited versions of essays previously published through this newsletter. Foreword by Greg Bennick (Trial, Between Earth and Sky, Bystander). Thank you.

Chapter 3: Fuck Flash

This one’s really simple: don’t use flash.

That’s it. That’s the advice.

Let me put it another way. Say you are a musical artist and you’re on stage giving it your all, creating participatory art, building a connection with your audience and you’re going over. And then, out of nowhere, some yahoo pushes a camera in front of your face and FLASH

That would suck, wouldn’t it? Yeah, it would. Not to mention how much it sucks for the people watching the performance.

Live music – and punk especially – relies on the participation of the audience to work. By this, I don’t mean actual musical participation (though it’s not excluded), it’s participation in the belief that this particular moment in time, this music, can elevate us all. It’s a release valve and a shot of energy at the same time.

But this participation is a delicate balance: both artist and audience need to know their place in the equation to make it work. Too many people with main character syndrome will ruin it – you know the type of people, those who think they’re funny and yell stupid shit in between songs. Or the ones doing weird things just to focus attention on themselves. It’s weird and off-putting behavior.

Using a flash falls in this same category. Your photography should not interfere with the balance between audience and artist in the quest to engage a higher form of being. So stop it.

Listen, I get it. It’s dark, the performers are moving around a lot, it’s hard to find an acceptable middle ground between aperture, shutter speed and ISO… But that doesn’t mean you get to fuck it up for everyone else. Not to mention that most of what you’ll bring home is be a lot of overexposed pics. And never mind capturing any of the dramatic stage lighting you could be making use of.

You can do better. It doesn’t come for free, you have to learn. You’ll take home a lot of bad photos, fucking around with aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings. But you’ll learn so much, standing there in front of the stage just trying to get one sharp image of a mad person hopping around with a microphone.

If you have a semi-recent camera of any decent brand, it will be good enough in low light for you to get a shutter speed of 1/60 at f/2.8 with a decent enough ISO. My preference is a Sony α, but these days they all do alright. With some patience and determination, you can figure this out.

(This is the closest I get in this entire zine providing practical photography advice.)

Just don’t flash a bright light in front of people trying to enjoy some music.