M3 at arena concert

I like taking photos at rock concerts. Unfortunately I don't have a pass or anything, and I'm typically seated far from the stage, so the camera needs to have a pretty long zoom. And as a garden variety audience member, you're also typically not allowed to bring in any substantial looking camera.

So far I've gotten by with compacts, but for an AC/DC concert last week in San Francisco I brought the M3 with CF-M 55-200mm lens. The seats were on the third level of the park, pretty far from the stage as this pre-concert iPhone photo shows:

Pre-concert iPhone photo, to give sense of scale

It was my first outing with the M3 --- I still need to get used to the camera. In fact when the lights went out, I felt lost since I realized I didn't even know where some of the controls were. (The kind of thing you just learn after a while.)

Overall the camera did pretty well. I do wish I had a longer zoom (the last compact I used had a 24-720mm equiv lens), but I think the 55-200mm is the largest lens I dare to attempt to bring in.

Anyway, here are some of the photos. Most are heavily cropped, to give me that extra reach. Thanks to the 24MP, even the smallest ones are still about 2-3MP. Note that I am posting the photos 1:1, not scaled down at all, for educational purposes. So you can see the noise and all. Typically I'd scale them down a bit more for casual viewing.

Exposure became a challenge when Angus took off his blue jacket and was left with a bright white shirt --- I had to constantly adjust the exposure between shots.

I also brought the viewfinder but didn't end up using it as I wanted to keep an eye on the concert as I took photos.

As I mentioned in another thread, I was happy to see that the battery held up pretty well thru hundreds of shots --- I was expecting much worse.

Ali

The big screens were a challenge --- many of the shots showing them captured black blocks, likely due to the refresh rate interaction.

That's confetti. Paper was flying everywhere for the next 10 minutes.