Shooting the 2011 Mayhem Festival with a point and shoot?

This weekend my boys and I headed to Mountain View Ca. for the Rockstar Mayhem Festival. If you haven’t heard of the Mayhem Festival its an all day affair featuring the biggest and best Metal and Thrash bands around. The music is certainly not for the faint of heart. The venue allows personal cameras as long as they do not have detachable lenses…so no DSLRs. I brought along my trusty Canon Powershot A640 which sports a 10 megapixel resolution.

As with any shooting, it comes down to how you have your camera set and how you compose the picture. I took a lot of photos here are a couple the first is the lead singer of the band Disturbed and the second the classic metal band Megadeth.

The first shot was taken towards the end of the show using shudder speed priority setting. I used this setting because I did not care as much about the objects behind the subject, the singer in this case being in sharp focus. I opened the shudder as wide as it would go (4.0) and reduced the exposure compensation by 1/3 step to get this shot. All I did was add some noise reduction and crop the image, otherwise it was as shot. I knew the camera would automatically raise the ISO to compensate for the low light so I was prepared to use noise reduction in my post processing (the point and shoot I have isnt great because of the size of the sensor) The second shot was taken at about 6pm so there was plenty of light so I used program mode and just let the camera do its thing, but I did set exposure compensation to -2/3 step to bring the exposure in lie with what I was seeing.

Overall I was pretty happy with the quality of the images given the camera I was using. I certainly did miss my DSLR while I was shooting though.