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If you thought my nine minutes with Elton John was a bit tight then consider the photographers covering Beyoncé's show at The Q Arena in Cleveland. They were allowed a mere 50 seconds. And not a very good 50 seconds either, according to Scott Shaw, photographer with Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer:

She came up in a cloud of mist, and the first 30 seconds she was just standing there. She was silhouetted by backlight, stood still, turned around, and started to sing. She sang like two notes and then a stage hand got up in front of me and said, 'OK, that's it. That's the best shot you're going to get.' And we were out of there.

The paper's director of photography Bill Gugliotta offers this theory:

It's all about controlling their own image, controlling what the public sees. If they limit the photographers to just the first three songs — or the first 50 seconds — they control what costume will be in the newspaper, what background, and reserve everything else for themselves. 

And photographer Lynn Ischay puts that a bit more bluntly:

If they get you out of there early, you don't get any shots after they get all sweaty, and their hair gets stringy and they take off the vests that hide the fat rolls.

Of course none of this can stop thousands of fans taking photos throughout the concert, or recording the concerts on their mobile phones and then posting the video on YouTube when Beyoncé reveals more than she intended to. 

Read the rest of the article to find out what concert photography used to be like when stars were more accommodating. (You can skip the survey screen between pages by clicking the link that says you're outside the US.)
Thanks to Jeremy Harmon for the link. 

You could say that photography is about showing people something that they wouldn't otherwise be able to see, so it's always a shame when news reports include photos that are so small that they're practically worthless.

One example is this BBC news report about two British Typhoon jet fighters being scrambled on 17 August on their first operational duty, intercepting a Russian bomber that was heading for British air space. The article includes a photo that shows the bomber and one of the Typhoon fighters, presumably taken by someone in the other Typhoon. Unfortunately it's only the standard 203-pixel version, with no option to view it larger.

So thanks to MilitaryPhotos.net for showing a decently sized version of the photo, along with another one from the same incident.

We all know the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe news web sites should keep that in mind. If a story needs a picture to illustrate it then why not show the picture at a decent size?

Wes Craft shows us how it's done with this set of wedding photos using off-camera lighting set-ups. Not just the formals, though, as that's standard practice nowadays. (Even I light the formals!) Wes takes it to another level by lighting the reception too. I don't know what's more impressive about these shots: The speed that Wes must work at, or the way he makes his lighting look so natural. Seeing these shots is definitely pushing me towards doing this sort of lighting at my next wedding…

If you're just starting to take an interest in lighting, or if you want to learn an easy trick to get more from your on-camera flash, then this is a must-see video:

Digital Photography One on One
by StudioLighting.net 
In this first episode, Mark Wallace of SnapFactory.com explains so-called key shifting, which isn't a term I've heard before but basically it's the technique for controlling ambient light and flash light separately in the same image. This is arguably the most important thing you need to know about your camera as it is fundamental to so many other techniques, and as soon as you get the hang of it you can start making some cool dramatic portraits with exactly the same equipment that you're already using.

Update: If you've watched the first episode and you don't want to wait for the second then head over to Mark's blog as he has posted it there already. This one discusses light meters in the same ground-up super-informative style.

Cincinnati freelancer Ryan Dlugosz has written up some concert photography tips. I'd question the use of primes over zooms but then compare Ryan's work to mine and I think he's the guy to listen to!

I just can't imagine shooting that Elton John concert, for example, with primes. If I'd used primes then I'd have probably gone for a 135mm on one body and a 14mm on the other, but on the day I don't think I used anything close to those two focal lengths. Changing lenses would have been practically impossible with the time restriction and so many other photogs bustling around in a small area.