This Is Not A Photo Opportunity

Wolf & Cub @ The Zoo

Tonight is a lesson in how not to photograph a gig.

As it’s a Friday, a Thursday night decision is made to take my camera gear to work and go straight out, first to the Bleeding Heart Gallery‘s Knock-Off Drinks before heading onto The Zoo.  However, forgetting to take my 28-70mm and only realising at 5pm that all I’ve got with me is the 70-200mm doesn’t help my cause.  Neither does drinking an awful lot of red wine. And then some cider.

A combination of taxi and walking to The Zoo means managing to get there towards the end of The Scare‘s set.  There’s still a few songs left but I just can’t get my camera to focus and no amount of taking it apart and checking the settings is fixing the problem.  Then I remember that I’d had right eye contact lens issues earlier in the day and had ended up taking it out, something I’d completely forgotten in the drunken haze.  The camera was working fine, it was me that was having the focusing issues… 

So I end up having to photograph using my left eye, something that is a lot harder than I would have expected, with the hand/eye coordination, just the seemingly simple act of looking through the viewfinder with my left eye, posing real problems and poking myself in my right eye with my thumb positioned on the shutter release button causing extreme discomfort every time I try and take a photo.

Wolf & Cub are the best I’ve seen them, but with singer/guitarist Joel much more animated than previous times, it only adds to tonight’s difficulties in trying to take some photos and it seems to take forever to finish off the 36-exposure roll of film. 

And after all this, the photos end up being pretty rubbish.  I decided to try out the Ilford 3200 film again after a long break but the images are very disappointing when compared to my usual choice of pushing Ilford HP5, with the images being very flat and with not much in the way of contrast, and needing Photoshop to tidy them up.

It was probably a good job that I was only photographing for myself tonight and not for any publications…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 12:16 pm. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with Brisbane, Ilford, ISO 3200, Justin Edwards, Minolta Dynax 5, The Zoo, Wolf & Cub. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.