Burn all the photographs, destroy the negatives

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?)

( Pictures (four dreadful, one ok) beneath cut )

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.

Photo Competition

Saturday was the deadline for the photo competition. And, I have to say, entries have this time not exactly been pouring in. Full marks to those who have sent me one or more photos, a conciliatory nod to those who provided notes from their mums (or similar) explaining why they wouldn't be entering, and to the rest... where are you ?

Honestly, people whine for months that they want another competition, then don't submit any pictures. So:

[Poll #703169]