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Camera mode: Manual
Shutter Speed: 1/250 or faster
Aperture: Wide open (f/1.4-f/2.8)
ISO: As high as possible; 3200 max
White Balance: Auto WB
Autofocus: AI-Servo
Drive Mode: Continuous
Metering: N/A
Image Quality: RAW

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This is an incredible advantage! You can get some of your settings wrong, or be slightly off, and still end up with a fantastic final photo. You’re also able to heavily adjust your shadows and highlights and retain a ton of detail, which makes editing much easier. Because of these abilities, RAW files are much larger than JPEG. Despite the size difference, it is not worth shooting in JPEG. SD and CF cards are inexpensive these days, and so are hard drives.

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When looking through your camera’s viewfinder, you’ll be able to find out your metering easily. When the indicator is to the right, your image is overexposed based on the in-camera meter setting. When it’s to the left, it’s underexposed.

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This is of course an important mode to capture the iconic moments of a set; a jump, spin, hair-flip, etc. You’ll want to make sure you get the highest point of the jump, for example, and instead of just taking one shot and hoping you got it, shooting in continuous lets you get a bunch of frames of the whole thing so you can select the best one.

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A helpful technique for concert photographers to learn is back button focus, which allows you to set another button on your camera to be in charge of focusing. Check out my post on back button focusing where I explain it in detail.

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Leaving your white balance on auto is the best thing you can do as a beginner. As you get a grip on the rest of your camera’s settings, you can start learning a bit more about how white balance works, and how you can adjust it to get consistent colors throughout your entire set of images.

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If you’re struggling to take bright enough photos, ISO may be the first setting you want to adjust. A little extra grain in your image beats having a blurry photo of the most important photo of the night that you’d get from having your shutter speed too slow.

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You’ll often shoot “wide open,” meaning the lowest f-number your lens allows for. The one downside of this is that the lower f-number you’re set at, the smaller depth of field you’ll have, and your image isn’t as sharp as a higher f-number. This can result in you missing your focus point, but good lenses and cameras make this less of an issue.

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But if your shutter speed it too slow, you get motion blur when subjects move in your frame. This is a big problem in concert photography, where your subjects are constantly moving and you really need to freeze motion. When the most iconic moments of a set are a big jump or a swinging guitar, you do not want those images to come out blurry.

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Shooting in manual mode gives you the most control over exposing your image correctly. You want to be able to change your settings quickly to combat changing lighting conditions, especially when shooting concerts.