Best known for her concert photography, Laura McCullagh is set to speak at the upcoming Canon Roadshow. After starting our chat with McCullagh last week, this week we talk about her favourite lens as well as the art of post-processing. 

TechSmart: If you had to pick Canon lens to shoot with, which one would it be and why?

Laura McCullagh: That's really hard to answer. The three lenses I use the most are the 70-200mm f4L (non IS), the 8-15mm f4L fisheye and the 17-40mm f4L. If forced to pick a favourite it would be the 70-200mm, every time I shoot it I feel happy since it's consistently good and every now and then it's downright excellent.

How much post processing work do you do afterwards? Do you have tips pertaining specifically to concert photography?

Depends on the venue and lighting but I generally do quite a bit of post-processing. I have a workflow set up with custom actions and filters though I never batch process and tweak each image individually.

Lighting is usually the trickiest element of shooting live music so I'd say find a good noise reduction plugin. Google have recently made their Nik filters collection free for download and it contains a great noise reducer 'Dfine), I'd definitely recommend downloading that if you haven't. If the stage light colours are awful you could always go monochrome though personally I try to do this only as a last resort, not to say black and white can't look good (it definitely can), I just prefer colour wherever possible. But to each his own!

All images courtesy and copyright of Laura McCullagh. For more of her work, visit her portfolio website, Facebook, YouTube or Blog.