What White balance setting for Concert Photography?

I was wondering what white balance setting would be the best for

concert photography on the 10d and the 1Ds. I have tried Tungsten and

the AWB settings and found that the AWB gives the best overall

results, the Tungsten settings seem to wash out with the mostly blue

and red/orange??

Dont forget you can do "White Balance Bracketing" and then see which is best on the back screen and pick. Also you can try to guesstimate a color temperature and set it that way. Last and perhaps best option is to simply shoot RAW and then worry about color balancing it later. In a concert the lights and colors change all the time, it is too much to try to keep up with it.

I personnaly prefer tungsten, as this is what keeps the original colors the best. If you want to have perfect skin color every time, you haev no choice but shooting RAW, as color of the ligth changes continuously. However, concert lighting consists of tungsten bulbs with color filters on front of them, so if you want to get the same colors you saw at the concert, tungsten is the best option.

 

Personnaly, I shoot RAW with tungsten setting, and most of the time I don't even change the WB in post-processing, but I like having the possibility to do it as I prefer having "true" skin color on SOME shots.

 

Or you could convert everything to B&W and don't worry abotu color temp, but that sucks a little.

 

Oh and another thing that is great with RAW and concerts... As it is really hard to get a perfect exposure in concerts (lights always changing, sometimes you have something like 5000W in their face, sometime you have 500), RAW gives you a fair bit of room to tweak exposure (+- 2 stops)

 

There was also a REALLY great article on concert shooting that helped me a TON shooting a concert last week.

 

And don't forget, take LOTS of pictures. If you don't have enough storage, loan it!