Burn all the photographs, destroy the negatives

[venta]

Help, help... FAO 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.

Comments

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

1. Use a tripod. Or a monopod. Or a table. Or a stack of pint glasses. A stable surface to rest the camera on is the thing to use, and if you've got a cable release, so much the better.

2. Get as close as you can to the subject.

3. If you've got a light meter in the camera, use spot metering. Or centre weighted. Don't use overall field, because it'll try to expose for the dark background and you really don't want that. Better still, if you've got a handheld meter take some readings of the group during sound checks, before the gig starts, and adjust your exposure times accordingly. You could also take a tape measure, so you can focus for distance

4. Only use flash if you can get very close to the subject. Don't try to take photos of the whole group unless you can...

5. Use a faster lens; if you've got a f1.8 50mm, use that.

That last photo is pretty good, I have to say. Because you got close enough for the subject to fill the frame it's not been overexposed (unlike the others) and so it's not wobbled either. Nice use of depth-of-field, too.

Using 1600 is fine, but the results will be grainy. You might like to think about using B&W and processing at home (daylight tank, black bag & chemicals take up very little space) and scanning negs rather than trying to print. That way, you can push-process your film if you need to and shoot a couple of stops faster than the 1600 your camera will meter for.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

You know you've got duff markup?

[kneeshooter]

Buy a Digital SLR? Hmmm, I guess that isn't an option...

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...

[davefish.livejournal.com]

I think you are being a little hard on yourself. Shutter speed is one of the big things. How bugger-all was your f/# buggerall? I've a 50mm f1.7 you can borrow for the Minoltas (In fact, I think we might have agreed that you would help with some of my old camera storage problem at some point)

Monitors and speaker stacks can occasionally be useful for helping with holding your gear steady during the set, in case you get long exposures. I'm sure that if you see me at the front of gigs, I'll often be in a silly position because I'm trying to wedge the camera against something.

ISO 1600 is a reasonable bet for a pub gig.

At bighuge apertures (f/# buggerall) depth of field can be tricky. Especially when the buggers decide that they are not there to be photographed, but to entertain the crowd, and bounce around a bit. If they keep coming back to the mic stand then you have something that you can use as a marker, where they will come back to. Focus on the face when he is at the mic stand, then stay where you are and wait for them to come back and let them move into focus, instead of you chasing the focus after them.

Good luck at your next gigs :)

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

Just to add to what others have said, you're also going to find that as you go up the film sensitivity scale, it'll cope less well with high dynamic ranges, so the white-out effect you've seen is pretty unavoidable.

The work-around for the camera being rated to only ISO1600 is to load with ISO3200 and set the exposure compensation to -1EV. This will allow you to have a better combination of aperture and shutter speed (i.e. less blur and/or more depth of field) but at the expense of increased grain and with worsened dynamic range issues.

The real answer, though, is that crap light is going to produce so-so results, no matter how good your kit is. If you don't want to use flash - understandable, and difficult to get good results for different reasons - find a pub with better lighting :(

soulfluff is a professional music photographer. If you look at some of the times when she's been working with bad lighting, such as here:

http://soulfluff.livejournal.com/557154.html

you'll see that the only thing which differentiates the dynamic range and blurriness of the stuff that you've posted and hers, is that hers has some heavy photoshopping.

[venta.livejournal.com]

1. For the particularly bad picture of Rebekah Ciccone I was using, er, a sort of railing thing as a stable surface. Sadly, I guess it wasn't that stable. Or she was vibrating gently.

I do have a tripod, but I dislike taking it out as people assume you're competent the more kit you have.

3. My camera must contain some form of light meter, but I have no idea how to persuade it to do spot metering. Would I be right in thinking it's a facility it may not have ?

I own three hand-held light meters (or am in possession of, I think technically one belongs to wimble). None of them work. They all worked when they came into my possession, and ceased abruptly. I don't know why. It's not like I tortured them by pointing them at striplights or anything.

Do my own developing ? Scary. Don't you have to be, like, educated and stuff to do that ?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Buy a Digital SLR? Hmmm, I guess that isn't an option...

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 :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

The work-around for the camera being rated to only ISO1600 is to load with ISO3200 and set the exposure compensation to -1EV.

Not this camera. I tried :)

The exposure compensation thing and the ISO setting are on the same dial. Once you get to 1600, the dial don't go roun any further.

I need to learn to fly Photoshop, really. It's outwitted me on a number of occasions. I'll have a look at Soulfluff's stuff, though, when I have a spare half-hour.

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a bugger :(

She's not doing a huge amount of photoshop jiggery pokery with those shots - just converting to black and white and upping the contrast.

[venta.livejournal.com]

My buggerall was f1.8 (50mm), but that was for the Olympus. If you're still looking for camera-gear-storage I'd love to borrow the Minolta lens as the smallest I can go is f3.5 (55mm) - and that camera goes up to 3200 :)

I did try a bit of wedging myself still on stationary objects, but really I think what I needed to do was nail the buggers on stage steady.

Focussing in advance sounds like a good plan, though. It takes me ages to focus (because my eyes actually focus very slowly) so I'm forever missing the trick.

[kneeshooter]

Recovery in Potatoshop is much easier with digital than with scanned film, simply because with scans it's about "boosting what you can see" whereas with digital there's also an element of "recovering hidden data that was captured in the first place".

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!

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Possibly I should give you a call pre-Whitby, to see what I should bring up with me in the loaning camera gear line. Or I could just bring the box of Minolta stuff.

Using the focus aids in the viewfinder is interesting in variable lighting conditions, but if you have a choice work out which one will give the good signal and then go with that.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

As to dropping - that's what straps are for!
At Whibty? I thought they were to be used as fashion accesories for trousers.