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Here is what I feel are must have accessories that you shouldn’t leave home without.
A must have regardless of how you use your camera. A clear glass protective filter is literary that. Sometimes known as a UV or skylight filter. It is a glass filter that screws onto the front of your lens to protect the actual lens glass and its protective coating.
Most photographers will tell you they will purchase one at the same time as a lens and many will never take them off except for cleaning. In a nightclub environment they will provide you with a way to stop people touching your actual lens and protect against the unavoidable instances of splashes and spills.
If you remove the filter prior to leaving for an event and clean the front element of the lens with a microfiber cloth and/or a blower, clean the filter and screw it back on your all set for a night of shooting. Never clean your actual lens with any fluids, even supposed lens cleaning fluids unless it is absolutely essential. With a filter attached this should be rarely.
You can purchase these for as little as £3 on eBay but in my experience, you can sometimes get what you pay for. Cheap filters can degrade the image quality so go a little more and try for a quality brand name like Hama or Hoya.
I don’t need to explain this really. It’s a cloth that you use to keep your lenses clean. You don’t need anything special or expensive, it just needs to be a microfiber cloth like you would clean your glasses with.
You need to make sure you keep your cloth nice and dry. It will be useless to you if it gets wet as all you will do it make your lens dirty and make more smudges.
Try not to wipe your lens too often, you will remove or damage the protective coating on the lens itself. If you are using a clear protective filter you can wipe as much as you require to keep it clean.
With the extra weight of a battery grip and a new, more expensive lens, it would be silly not to make sure you have a tight grip on your camera when in the middle of a crowd. There are several versions and they can range from £5 on eBay to £30-40 for an original version from your brand manufacturer. In all honesty, it is a simple device and the £5 will serve you just as well.
The versions you see above are just some of the styles you can get. I have the first one. It connects via your cameras inbuilt loop for the neck strap. You are supplied with a connection kit so you can attach the neck strap and the hand grip to the single right side loop. You also get a mounting bracket that’s attached to the tripod mount. If you have a battery grip it should have the bottom loop so you do not need the mounting bracket.
A worth while investment if you are prone to accidents and a must just for the fact that your camera will get bumps and bangs in heavy crowds regardless of how careful you are.
The strap that is included with your camera when you get is going to be your enemy when you are in a hot sweaty nightclub. It is probably rather rigid and when you are constantly moving your camera it will start to rub and cut into your next and become very uncomfortable, very quickly.
One of the most recommended upgrades (other than a sling strap) will be a neoprene neck strap. Made from the same soft material that wetsuits are made from, they are super soft, have a fair bit of elasticity which acts as a shock absorber or sorts and will not rub at your neck. It is also very grippy so it will not slip about.
Jessops have their own brand strap which is a good price at £12.95 (Dec 2011) and comes with quick release clips making it easy to detach when you need to.
A sling strap is a one shoulder strap in a continuous loop. The strap connects via your tripod mount with a special fixing. A sling strap allows to have the camera by your side and at a moments notice bring the camera to your face without having the strap tangle round your neck. It achieves this with the sliding loop.
Black Rapid make a selection of sling straps for men and women with a whole range of accessories that suit individual needs.
There are of course many other manufacturers of sling straps each with their own variation of the same basic sling design.
Above you can see the same lens with and without a lens hood.
The first purpose of a lens hood is to stop excess light getting into your lens and causing flares. The second purpose is to protect the lens. As you can see it protrudes quite a way from the front element and this is the benefit to a nightlife photographer. Moving through a crowded room you are inevitably going to brush past people and the hood will prevent the front of your lens actually being touched.
Most manufacturers provide bayonet style hoods with their lenses. They can be twisted 90 degrees to unlock them and remove them. You can then invert them and put them back on the lens to be stored and to save on space in your kit bag.
If you are not provided with one and original manufacturer version can cost up to £30 but you can find perfectly suitable third-party hoods if you shop around for less than half the price.
So, you have been shooting a while and want to take your next steps towards progressing.
These are my recommendations for your first upgrades or investments.
Most new users will probably not stray from the ‘Auto’ or ‘P’ modes.
The camera will do a great job at exposing the photo correctly by firing the flash to freeze the subjects. This will leave you with quite a standard looking snapshot.
As you can see from the above photo, the effect is quite flat and not very dramatic.
Now take the next photo for example…
To achieve this effect you will need to know a little about how to operate your camera to set the following settings.
Switch your camera into the ‘M’ mode via the dial on the top. This puts the camera into manual.
Leave all the other settings as they are, presuming you have not changed much from the default options and dial in the following options :
ISO : 400
Shutter : 1/4
Aperture : 3.5
The aperture has been based on a standard kit lens. This will work perfectly fine with any lens you are using.
By setting these options, you are in control of what the camera is doing.
When you are shooting in low light situations like a nightclub you want to capture as much light as you can. The club lighting is your friend, but it is also your enemy and we will cover that in a different post.
ISO
ISO is how sensitive the camera is to the light it can see. In an automatic mode, your camera will always try to get this number as low as possible. Typically in daylight the camera will aim for an ISO of 100 or lower. There is plenty of light in the day time. In a club you have very little so you need to make the camera more sensitive to it.
ISO also introduces digital noise into a picture as you go higher. Your camera will have noise reduction built-in and turned on by default so don’t worry about this right now. We will cover this later.
Shutter
This controls how long the camera takes the picture for. This is measured in seconds of time. The setting of 1/4 is one quarter of a second. This is what will give you the light trail effect you see in the example and will give you a feel of movement in the photo. When you take the photo the flash will fire and the photo will start to be taken. The camera will continue to take the photo for 1/4 of a second and then stop. As the flash fired at the beginning, it froze the subjects effectively taking the photo you wanted and then the camera continued to capture the available light.
Aperture
The aperture controls how much light the camera can see. The lower the number (less than 3.5), the brighter the image will be. The club lighting and other background lighting will be enhanced although the aperture controls two things. How bright the image is and how far the camera can see which is known as Depth of Field or DOF. DOF will be covered in a future post
These settings are a basic starting point and should serve you well while you learn to understand how they work.
Play around, tweak each of these settings up or down one increment at a time and take some shots, see how it changes the photos and see what you like. If all goes wrong, just dial these settings back in and try again.
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This is a little trick you may or may not know or use but it works very well for me when I’m rushing to change batteries while I’m missing a performance because they ran out of juice.
This is how I store and pack my batteries for a night out.
2 of the batteries are positive terminal up and 2 are down in an alternating pattern. These batteries are charged and ready to go. In this configuration its very quick to see, or if your in the dark to feel that the bundle is charged. Its also the same way that the flash’s battery compartment takes the batteries.
When I need to change, I pull out the dead batteries. Leaving the rubber band on, I place the charged set into the flash to the depth of the band then i pull the band off letting them slide in. That’s was easy.
The dead batteries I just removed get bundled back up with the rubber band I removed from the charged set but I set up the dead batteries so they are all positive terminal up. Easy to identify as dead and keep track of what sets need a charge when I return home. This only takes about 15 seconds to change a set and get shooting again.
The camera batteries are charged if they have a cap on them. I use them in number order. If I get home and have B3 & B4 in the camera I know B5 & B6 are still charged.
I hope some of you find this tip useful.
Do you have any techniques or tricks you use? Please let us know.
If like me you have a lot of batteries to care for there are a few things you can do to make life a little better for yourself and for your batteries.
Take a look at the following picture.
Yes, that is 6 sets of AA’s and 6 main camera batteries.
This gives you an idea of how I manage my batteries.
My main camera batteries are in pairs of 2. B1 & B2, B3 & B4 and B5 & B6. Each pair are the same brand and purchased as a pair. B1 & B2 are Canon originals and the rest are Energizer.
As with each bundle of AA’s, they were bought as sets of 4 and have never been mixed or split or used in other devices. I purchase new sets of AA’s every year and the retired sets go on to power the rest of my gadgets.
As a new photographer you may be wondering if your kit is up to the task? This is a list of the essential pieces of kit you need to start making your way into the world of nightlife photography.
Some may seem obvious, like a camera, but do you have enough power for all your kit? Maybe there is something on this list you don’t have?
Take a look and see if your ready to take your first steps.
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