Azerbaijani Concert at Irvine Barclay Theater

Shooting concerts is always fun, particularly when one has proper access to move around the venue. We recently had a chance to shoot the latest Azerbaijani Folk Concert by Mr. Rahim Shahryari at the UCI Irvine Barclay Theater. It was a great concert where he played many of the classic Azeri folk songs.

Like any concert, the lighting was pretty challenging, and constantly changing in both intensity and color. To deal with it, we always bump up the ISO, set to manual exposure, and adjust aperture and shutter speed quickly as needed. We typically leave White Balance in Auto, and make any WB adjustments in post processing, when necessary. For that, it is very important that we shoot in RAW which gives us full control over WB adjustment. Unlike the previous concerts we have shot, we decided to go all prime this time. Specifically, we had Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye, Sigma 35mm f/1.4 ART, Sigma 50mm f/1.4 ART, and Zeiss 135mm f/2 APO. Sigma ART series lenses are fantastically sharp even wide open, and render the images with beautiful colors and contrast. And then comes Zeiss 135mm, arguably one of the sharpest lenses ever built. The challenge with Zeiss though is that, with Nikon and Canon camera bodies, it is Manual Focus only. This is not a big deal with the static subjects but manual focusing on dynamic subjects, particularly with today’s modern camera viewfinders which lack proper focus screens is a bit of challenge.  But once you nail the focus, the result is beautiful indeed. With all prime shooting, at times, we did miss the convenience of a zoom in composing the shots, but overall it turned out to be just fine.

Below are a few of our sample shots from this concert. Hope you like them, and as always, please feel free to leave any comments you may have.Thanks for visiting…