Our Gear

For you photographers, here's what we shoot with.

Shotmonster started humbly with a Fuji Finepix 550. The pictures we got were crap at best, and we realized we needed to upgrade. Our next camera was the Canon S5 IS, which is arguably the best point and shoot concert shooting camera available at this particular moment. You can see the results this camera produces in our Raconteurs gallery.

When we decided to found Shotmonster, we decided it was time to kick it up a notch. Our first cameras were two Nikon D300s. We shot our Warped 08 galleries on these cameras. A few months later, Nikon surprised us with the D700 so we bit the bullet and upgraded to the new camera mainly because of better low-light performace.

For lenses, we usually shoot with three fast zooms - the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8, the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 and the Nikon 70-200mm f2.8. The fast speed of these lenses makes them ideal for concert shooting in low light and still need a high shutter speed to capture the action.

We find the 24-70 and the 70-200 to be the most useful lenses, though the 14mm produces some of our most dramatic images. For exceptionally low light shoots, we have a 35mm f2, a 50mm f1.4 an 85mm f1.4 and a 135mm f2, all Nikons.

We capture our images on San Disk 16gb Extreme III cards, and color correct our pictures with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CS3. For those occasions when we're forced to shoot at ISO 6400 or beyond, we employ a terrific program called Noise Ninja to make those pictures more presentable. We shoot 12-bit, lossless compressed RAW files.