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kneeshooter, davefish, nalsa or anyone else who can wield a camera best out of three.
A couple of weeks ago I finally summoned the courage to ask if I could take a camera along to a gig; I've been wanting for some time to experiment with this gig-photo-ing lark. Sadly, gigs seem to divide into two categories: sufficiently large that you need a pass, and sufficiently small that it seems rude not to check with the band first. The latter should be easy, but I'm very scaredy.
The gig was in a tiny pub, and I thought a flash gun would be quite annoying to the people on stage, so bought a fast film[*] and trusted to luck. With hindsight, that was a big mistake. I took the pictures at f-buggerall to try and get the exposure time as short as possible, but it was nowhere near short enough.
Pretty much none of the pictures I took are at all presentable, but below the cut I present a few of them anyway in the hopes someone can offer a bit of constructive advice. OK, so the advice may well be "use a flashgun, you fool". (In which case how, with a small stage, do you do it without being intrusive and a nuisance?)
The Good Ship, in Kilburn, is very dark. Really very dark. Except for one highly directional spotlight, which lights up at most one person on the stage. Any tips for how to approach such a stage (with a camera) would be very welcome.
Incidentally: I own several SLRs, none of them is digital. So if your suggestions involve swapping between different ASAs, please remember that means me carrying several cameras around, which is rarely practical :) Also, I can't check photos on the fly to see if they're working; it's a few days at the developers before I know if a shot came out. Everything I own is manual focus, so anything poorly focussed should be blamed on me not the hardware.
[*] Well, 1600. That camera can only handle up to 1600, so I didn't have a lot of option :) I do have a camera which will cope with 3200, but I doubt it would have made a massive amount of difference.
Edit Now with fixed markup, so it looks nicer. Honestly, what a lot of fuss over a missing >. And no thanks to the Semagic client's "preview" for displaying it all correctly and thus making me miss the error.
kneeshooter, davefish, nalsa or anyone else who can wield a camera best out of three.A couple of weeks ago I finally summoned the courage to ask if I could take a camera along to a gig; I've been wanting for some time to experiment with this gig-photo-ing lark. Sadly, gigs seem to divide into two categories: sufficiently large that you need a pass, and sufficiently small that it seems rude not to check with the band first. The latter should be easy, but I'm very scaredy.
The gig was in a tiny pub, and I thought a flash gun would be quite annoying to the people on stage, so bought a fast film[*] and trusted to luck. With hindsight, that was a big mistake. I took the pictures at f-buggerall to try and get the exposure time as short as possible, but it was nowhere near short enough.
Pretty much none of the pictures I took are at all presentable, but below the cut I present a few of them anyway in the hopes someone can offer a bit of constructive advice. OK, so the advice may well be "use a flashgun, you fool". (In which case how, with a small stage, do you do it without being intrusive and a nuisance?)
The Good Ship, in Kilburn, is very dark. Really very dark. Except for one highly directional spotlight, which lights up at most one person on the stage. Any tips for how to approach such a stage (with a camera) would be very welcome.
 | If you knew her very well, you might just about recognise this as Rebekah from Ciccone. I reckon I could possibly get away with one or two photos this blurred and call them artistic - but when 95% of your film's come out like this it smacks pretty heavily of incompetence. I'm sure it'd have all been fine if the little blighters on stage didn't move about so much. Incidentally, these images are fairly ropey scans, and then they're compressed so's not to eat my webspace. So the prints look slightly better - but trust me, not much. |
| This thoroughly nondescript photo is just included to try and give some sort of idea of what the stage set up was like. Notably, very bright in a highly localised spot, and very dark everywhere else. |  |
 | This is Simon Indelicate, standing directly under the spotlight. Which means he's nearly in focus. Unfortunately, it also means that his hand is mostly whited out, owing to the glare. I have no idea how to avoid that. |
| Fortunately, the bass player actually stands quite still some of the time, so it was nearly possible to take a photo of her that wasn't completely blurred. |  |
 | I think this is the only picture from the whole film which I could plausibly pass off as a reasonable photo. I'm actually quite pleased with how it came out (it does, at least, look like I was intending it to). Accordingly, aesthetic comments on this one are invited ;) |
Incidentally: I own several SLRs, none of them is digital. So if your suggestions involve swapping between different ASAs, please remember that means me carrying several cameras around, which is rarely practical :) Also, I can't check photos on the fly to see if they're working; it's a few days at the developers before I know if a shot came out. Everything I own is manual focus, so anything poorly focussed should be blamed on me not the hardware.
[*] Well, 1600. That camera can only handle up to 1600, so I didn't have a lot of option :) I do have a camera which will cope with 3200, but I doubt it would have made a massive amount of difference.
Edit Now with fixed markup, so it looks nicer. Honestly, what a lot of fuss over a missing >. And no thanks to the Semagic client's "preview" for displaying it all correctly and thus making me miss the error.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-03 08:56 am (UTC)Seriously - they're not bad and to be honest the only way I suspect anyone else would get much better under "crap-pub-light" conditions is to significantly underexpose on the camera (I normally shoot at betweeen -1 and -2EV on camera) and then "recover" in Potatoshop - it's the only way I find to both compensate for the lack of spot metering on my SLRs.
Beyond that - just concentrate on composition as ever...
(btw - I get a markup error on the entry rather than nice embedded HTML)
If you're at Whitby then you're welcome to play with one of my digitals during the bands. If I get to the Spa that is...
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 11:00 pm (UTC)Not really :)
In addition, I'm perverse enough to actually like the limitations of film. Plus I find it very consoling to know that if/when I drop my SLR, lose it, leave it behind or get mugged for it I can replace the whole outfit for about £100 ;)
Potatoshop remains a complete mystery to me. Could you recommend a guide to recovery, as I'm useless at anything more advanced than cropping.
I shall be at Whitby, though I might well be too scaredy to take you up on that generous offer. See above about dropping, losing etc :)
no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 05:54 am (UTC)Have a look at http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/photoshop-levels-1-2-3.html?source=rss for an idea of how using Levels might help recover some of the detail and effectively inflate exposure.
As to dropping - that's what straps are for!
no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 12:25 pm (UTC)At Whibty? I thought they were to be used as fashion accesories for trousers.