This picture was taken during the rehearsals for a concert in a church in November 2022. There are a couple of things that I really like about this picture: firstly the fact that the microphone is not overlapping any part of his face – this is something that is notoriously difficult to get right with singers during live shows because they tend to work very close to the microphone. One solution is to photograph from the side or at 45-degree angle, which can work but tends to lose the connection between the artist and the photographer. In this case, I think I just got lucky.
The second thing that I really like is the blurring in Rob’s right hand as he strums the guitar. It is difficult to invoke this sense of motion in a picture of a musical performance without having motion blur in other parts of the image. Once again, a lot of this comes down to good fortune and taking lots of pictures. There is no magic formula, but I have found that a shutter speed of around 1/160th of a second is about right in these situations: much higher than that and you don’t get any blur (and your ISO takes a hit), much lower than that and you start to lose sharpness in eyes and faces.
Canon EOS-R, RF 85mm F/2.