Capturing the concert experience is something that every live music fan can relate to and while it’s resulted in a modern gig landscape dotted with punters aping amateur photographers and filmmakers with their smartphones, the idea at the heart of bringing your camera to a show remains the same.
But if you’re one of those that takes the extra step of capturing your favourite shows with a more expensive piece of equipment than just your iPhone, you may want to take note (or look away, actually), as there’s some cautionary evidence that bringing your camera to a concert can do some nasty damage.
No, we’re not discussing a punter sloshing their cheap beer on your lenses or even your kit getting knocked into the moshpit, but that the more visually intense light shows at concerts can fry your camera’s image sensor.
As PetaPixel reports, high-end displays at shows have damaged high-tech cameras, like the popular Canon 5D Mark II model, after lasers pass through the lens and make then unusable. The damage occurs by the laser ‘burning’ out the photosensitivity of a particular pixel in the camera’s display, where even one damaged pixel can knock out an entire row or column, resulting in white lines appearing on the viewfinder.
The below user footage, as Peta Pixel points out, shows several grid-like lines appearing on the camera’s lens with each passing laser. It’s pretty painful viewing if you’re a tech head…
There’s other video footage from several online users showing their lenses being permanently scarred in real time, with white lines forming on the camera’s eye. And if it can happen to more high-end equipment, there’s a risk that it can affect the lenses of some models of smartphone also.
Speaking of smartphones, a report from Wired has spelled out what most tech-savvy concert shooters already know. The pictures that you’re taking with the iPhone are pretty bad – because you’re using flash.
The flash installed on the pocket-sized smartphones (and more high-end Digital SLR cameras) is only designed for close quarters, to illuminate a subject that’s only a short distance from the lens (re: selfies), so unless you’re already up close and personal at a concert, the flash actually degrades the image of whatever is in the background – which is why you can see the backs of the people in front of you in such great detail but the band is just a shadowy, blurry mess.
As well as being short-sighted, the auto flash setting on most mobile devices is designed to simply compensate the lack of exposure and lighting for the environment, which actually makes everything already lit up darker. Common sense really, but the more you know.
So while there are more social media innovations – from the likes of Deezer and FourSquare offering free music subscriptions, or the new Instagram video – to encourage the use of smartphones at concerts, just remember next time you’re gearing up for a major concert or music festival: flash off and cameras away if there’s an intense light show.
