Budget camera? Yes. But if it’s the right budget camera.
Your camera is not ideal. it’s optimized to be able to zoom in a ton but it isn’t good in low light.
So no, it’s not going to be as good as a high end camera, but you can try somethings, and you an definitely use it to learn and improve your skills. Here’s some advice:
If you haven’t already learn about manual exposure (look up videos on the exposure triangle and figure out the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO). You need to drill this as you will need to override things on the camera.
DO NOT stand in the back and zoom in. The closer you can get, the better off you are, the more you zoom in, the less light you’ll have to work with. Someone taught me early on “If your images suck: you’re not close enough.”
Understand that most stages or shows will have very very dark backgrounds. This often tricks the camera into thinking it needs to make the image brighter than it needs to be. This makes the lead singer’s face blown out and it means it made choices that caused the image to be more blurry to get more light. This is why you want to use manual exposure and adjust it so the lead singer’s face looks good even if the background goes very dark (which can be fine as it can make the scene more moody)
If you have to set the ISO higher than you like and they come out noisy, try converting them to B&W… that can help you quite a bit. Also do some tests with the camera. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can shoot RAW, but see if there are noise reduction settings. If you feel things get too “smeared” at high ISO, you can see if there are “noise reduction” settings you can reduce or turn off. Sometimes a bit of noise in B&W looks better than a smeared photo from too much noise reduction.
I was writing specific to OP’s camera, and to a lesser extend the broader category of “budget cameras” which are more likely to have variable max aperture lenses.
However even with constant aperture lenses, at longer focal lengths you may need to increase shutter to compensate for shake to the point you lose light (subjects are moving so you will need some bit of a fast shutter, but if you are going to push limits and try to time 1/45th or 1/60th second exposures when the lead singer is in a pose, doing it at 200+mm can be more problematic. A constant f/4 lens this is much less of an issue than OP’s f/3-5.9 lens, but shutter speed still factors a little. Additionally composition and perspective may be improved by getting closer.
Budget camera? Yes. But if it’s the right budget camera.
Your camera is not ideal. it’s optimized to be able to zoom in a ton but it isn’t good in low light.
So no, it’s not going to be as good as a high end camera, but you can try somethings, and you an definitely use it to learn and improve your skills. Here’s some advice:
It should be noted that this only applies to lenses with variable aperture number, such as the one in P520.
For fixed f-number lenses the amount of light is independent of zoom amount (as the physical aperture opening scales with focal length).
I was writing specific to OP’s camera, and to a lesser extend the broader category of “budget cameras” which are more likely to have variable max aperture lenses.
However even with constant aperture lenses, at longer focal lengths you may need to increase shutter to compensate for shake to the point you lose light (subjects are moving so you will need some bit of a fast shutter, but if you are going to push limits and try to time 1/45th or 1/60th second exposures when the lead singer is in a pose, doing it at 200+mm can be more problematic. A constant f/4 lens this is much less of an issue than OP’s f/3-5.9 lens, but shutter speed still factors a little. Additionally composition and perspective may be improved by getting closer.
that’s really useful, thanks!!