This Is Not A Photo Opportunity

Batrider + Scul Hazzards

Originally wasn’t going to this but ended up doing some promo shots in the Valley earlier in the evening and just ended up staying around. Had my camera with me and despite my well known love of photographing at The Troubadour decided to get a few shots. The lighting wasn’t as bad as the ISO1600, f1.7, 1/25 second that my camera meter was telling me I needed at the Nation Blue gig earlier in the year, but it wasn’t much better…

It’s times like photographing at The Troubadour that I miss photographing with film. I have no issues like a lot of music photographers when it comes to film graininess (which is far more aesthetically pleasing than digital noise), and I have no problems with blur. Sharpness is far overrated…

It amuses me that music photographers will normally say the most iconic photos are Pennie Smith’s shot of Paul Simenon on the front of London’s Calling and Jim Marshall’s photo of Johnny Cash (not live, taken at a sound check and essentially posed, as there’s a series of them and the people in the background move between the different shots, so it was obviously a held pose, even if for only a couple of seconds), both of which have some degree of blur, and yet they criticise anything that’s not pin sharp…

I guess digital camera high ISOs are improving but even though anything above 800 starts looking like the Turin Shroud, I’ve got no intention to replace my camera until maybe next Xmas. As long as it keeps going that long – it’s been experiencing the dreaded black frame for a while now. Will have had it three years by then. Don’t understand the logic of replacing a camera every couple of years, or even buying two cameras in one year because a new model has been released. Generally the differences aren’t that revolutionary. My two year old, released about 6 months before I bought it, 6MP camera gets me published regularly, does me for CD covers and inlays and for promo shots. And the people that count say they like the photos. So that’s good enough for me for now.

So, I guess for the meantime The Troubadour will remain and noisy/blurry photo environment…

More noise/blur on flickr.

Batrider

Scul Hazzards

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 5:12 am. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with Batrider, Brisbane, Justin Edwards, Scul Hazzards, Tara, Troubadour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.