Marching Band Photography Tips

My friend Dan Zeis has been shooting (among other things) Marching Band Competitions for the past couple of years and I help him out from time to time with it. He's made a decent event business out of this, selling prints and gifts to the band parents via his website.

Here are some tips on shooting marching bands in no particular order...


The bigger they are...
...The harder they are to capture! Marching Bands are rated in a class system that varies a bit in specifics depending on the competition, but most always the system is based on size:

• A – Up to 36 wind players
• AA – 37–54 wind players
• AAA – 55–77 wind players
• AAAA – 78–100 wind players
• Open (or AAAAA in some cases) – 101 or more wind players

The competition performances are typically around 12-14 minutes in length and that's not a lot of time when your goal is to get a clear shot of each individual member!

Exposure settings
Dark skies & dark uniforms, sunny days with white accents - these are challenging conditions. The best thing you can do is to operate in Manual Exposure mode and meter the scene ahead of time. If you're getting consistent lighting then this is going to be your best bet - one less thing to worry about while you're trying to get all these clear shots.

It's even more critical at night - the black sky will confuse your camera's meter into overexposing... the result will be both blown highlights and blurry images due to the unnecessarily slow shutter speeds.

Don't be afraid to pump up the ISO a bit. There's little chance that any of these photos will be purchased larger than 8x10", so any noise in the shot won't be too big a deal. Better to have something slightly noisier that's sharp than to have clean shots that are too blurry to sell.

At Colerain I had my exposure locked at 1/200sec @ f/2.8, ISO 800. At Madison I had to push the ISO to 1600 and the shutter down to 1/160 in order to get enough light. On the Canon gear these ISOs are perfectly usable, especially at smaller output sizes.

During the day, you may get enough light to be able to use a polarizer on the lens which will go a long way to help reduce the glare off of the field and uniforms. Note that in all cases we don't need shutter speeds much faster than 1/200 or so - the bands typically move & stop, move & stop, so it's not the "motion freezing" situation that you're faced with when shooting football or other high-action sports.

White Balance
For white balance I just used AWB (auto) since the Canon holds up reasonably well outside. There may be some advantage to getting an actual Kelvin reading from the stadium lighting, but that may be fickle depending on the type of lights in use (because of sodium vapor lights delivering varying temperatures).

I chimped a few AWB exposures and they looked good enough for our purposes.

Shoot JPEG
Though I'm a huge RAW Fanboy, there's no way I'd consider shooting anything but JPEG for a gig like this. You'll be taking literally thousands of frames throughout the day and handing the cards off to a runner - there's no time (or space!) to deal with RAW conversions or the fine tuning of anything. Since you've metered the scene ahead of time and set your white balance there won't be much of a need to tweak anyway.

There's also the economics of it: when you're doing the kind of volume we're talking here - thousands of parents and grandparents, maybe 5-10% of whom will purchase a print - it is simply not worth your time to fine tune each and every frame.

Speaking of frame counts - most of the photos in this post are of the Terre Haute North Marching Band. Why? Because they were still on one of my memory cards. :)

Lens Choice
The Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS is what I've been gunning with out there, but I think you'd benefit from a slightly longer option as well if you need to get the kids in the back rows. Fortunately, most band routines cycle the players from the back to the front which mitigates the problem as long as you're quick to get a shot of each of them.

A fast f/2.8 is critical due to the need to isolate the performers and to deal with the crappy lighting on most high school football fields.

It's all about isolating the band members so that it is a photograph of *them* - you need fast telephoto lenses to do this properly! The goal is to sell a print to the parent(s) of an individual band member; the photo has to be about them to be effective.

Flute players are easy / "this one time, at band camp..."
Indeed - the flutes are pretty easy to get clear photographs of, second only to the folks in the Pit (as long as the pit is in the front - one band had them in the back & there were few if any usable shots of them). The toughest are probably the trumpets... they've always got the bell of the horn blocking out their whole face! In order to get these guys, you'll need to catch them from the side or while standing at rest. Between the two photos below, which do you think will sell better (or even be identifiable to the parents)?

And that's not really an extreme case - I've got plenty where a player turned just before I expected and you end up with a frame full of horn. Sounds painful, no?

Compare that to the petite flute and you can see what I mean when I say they're a far easier catch!

Shows this year
Two of the larger shows we photographed this year were the Colerain Invitational and the March on Madison. Dan has done a number of others, but I typically only help out on the bigger ones.

The Colerain show was very large - five A, ten AA, seven AAA, two AAAA, and three Open bands performed. Not only did they perform, but the show was divided into two rounds: the top 10 bands were invited back to play again in the evening performance! A solid 12-hour schedule. The Centerville Band took the top awards in this competition with a very well-done show.

The show in Madison, IN was quite a bit smaller but still quite an effort. Columbus North cleaned up at this show & it was a well-deserved honor. Extremely good band!

Incidentally, if you'd like to browse through the photos from any of this year's shows check out the Zeis Photography website.

It's All Work and No Play
All said, this kind of a gig is a lot more "work" than "art". Not to mention the strain that it puts on your shutter! For the same reasons that I'm not all that into shooting sports, I'm not a huge fan of shooting these band shows. At least, not with the "get one of everyone" mentality that we've got to use for this particular event photography application.

I don't mind doing it every so often to help Dan out, but if you see me shooting a band for fun you can bet that I'll be taking a drastically different approach!

NOTE - to those interested, the monitor is still standing! -RRD