I was 9 years old when Gary Numan was worldwide famous with the U.K. number one hits: “Cars” and “ Are friends Electric?”.

You can imagine I was thrilled when they asked me to photograph the man himself in both the legendary “London Royal Albert Hall” & “The Bridgewater Hall” in Manchester.

I did not know at that time they were for the cover of the CD/DVD and 3LP release of “When the Sky came down”.

For some reason the lightning designer did not use a lot of front light and he also choose to use stroboscopic light. With these light conditions it is very difficult to photograph and have good shots. The only thing you can do is to make as many photos as possible and hope for the best. When there is very little light some cameras just cannot focus.

 In my opinion concert photography is not that difficult. You are not allowed to use flash anyway. It’s all about using the correct settings. Most of the time I use S (shutter speed) or M (manual). I choose the lowest aperture possible, ISO on automatic and shutter speed should be at least 1/200 or faster.

Set the camera on AFC (continuous autofocus), and shoot. Make sure you use at least a wide angle lens and a second camera with a general zoom lens like a 24-70. I used the Sony G 24-105 f/4 and a Samyang 14mm f/2.8.

Back in the hotel room I was disappointed because the hit rate of good photos was very low. The reason was bad lightning. To give you an idea the black & white photo on top of this page taken from the back of the stage towards the crowd is one out of 30 I took shooting at 10fps for 3 seconds! All others were pure black.

Luckily for the other photos the image sensor of the A7R3 is so good you can push the shadows. It was a lot of work by dodging and burning in Photoshop to get the results I wanted.

Gary Numan and his worldwide hit “Cars” from the album “The Pleasure Principle” released in 1979.