28 July 2010
Latitude Festival Photography
Saw the light beams and found it impossible to resist. Pentax MX + Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + HP5+ @ 1600.
The Plan
The plan for photography at latitude was the simplist one I could possibley come up with for shooting film. 1 Camera (+ 1 backup), 2 lenses, 1 Type of film. My cameras were a Pentax MX and a Pentax ME Super, my lenses a Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 and a Takumar 135mm f2.5, and my film Ilford HP5+ 400 speed black and white film.
Getting In
Jonsi really impressed me, gave me true Sigur Ros style shivers. Was really excited about this shot as I took it; Jonsi lit up with the rest of his band silhouetted in a sea of dust. Pentax MX + Takumar 135mm f2.5 + HP5+ @ 1600.
So apparently, big commercial festivals, such as Latitude has become, have decided it’s really time to start clamping down on amateur photographers who want to have a bit of fun with some old film equipment. Every day I managed to get into the arena, just after differing conversation about why I was only dubiously within the ever changing rules. First day it was no “big zooms”, well I got past that one by completely legitmately claiming that 135mm doesn’t zoom at all. It went from there to being no interchangeable lenses, which required me to do some minor begging, just about persuading them to let me in.
I didn’t just take photos of bands. Here’s Sophie being oh so incredibly nice to me. Pentax MX + Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 + HP5+ @ 1600.
Results
So, here’s what I think of the results. I think if you like the style, it’s a fun and easy way to take nice photos at a festival, but I do realise that grain is hardly to everyone’s taste. There are a few things I can quickly think of that would have really improved the results:
- My crowd positioning could consistently have been better. I never really had the drive this festival to get forward and so the 50mm saw very little use for band shots, in fact generally I was so far away that the 135mm was giving me the full band shots you see here. This in turn forced me to use f2.5, which forced me into shutter speed ranges I’d prefer not to be in.
- Get a camera with a more advanced light meter; I love my 1970s Pentax relics, but the light meter is very very easily confused, especially by stage lighting.
- Learn to have a steadier hand. Quite a lot of camera shake going on when I was getting down to 1/125 and 1/60 with the 135mm on, which I suppose is to be expected. I imagine however I could have done a bit better if I’d really concentrated at it.
I still got a couple of images I’m really pleased with, and I definitely enjoyed the photographic process as always, and that’s what it’s all got to be about at the end of the day.
The National were my Friday night headliner. Excellent as always. What this photo shows up is that shooting at 800 speed gave very little advantage in terms of reduced grain over shooting at 1600, at least not in these less than optimum lighting conditions. Pentax ME Super + Takumar 135mm f2.5 + HP5+ @ 800.
Another potential option might be to shoot with a more modern type of black and white film. HP5+ grains more heavily than, for example, Neopan 400 by my reckoning. As much as I adore HP5+ generally, I think Neopan will get it’s chance next time.
Coming soon
I’ve written another post about the festival that’s just waiting for some photography to go with it, so check back!
Posted by matt at 20:52
14 June 2010
Action Sampling
For my birthday the lovely Lizzie bought me this rather silly looking “4 Lens Action Sampler”. It is essentially an unreasonably simple camera with 4 plastic lenses of fixed focussing distance. With the cameras single preset apature and shutter speed it is essentially a toy, but an absolutely excellent one.
The “Action Sampler” aspect comes from the fact that each square of the photo is taken with a slight time lapse from the last, hence the possibility of capturing motion. I seemed to universally suck at this on my first roll with the camera.
I think a lot of issues with the photos I took revolved around the lack of any kind of viewfinder. On the recommendation of Lizzie I took to using what has become known to me as the rather humerous “face-finder” technique. I.e. look at what you want to take a photo of, stick the camera in front of your face, and hope.
As you can see above though, this left my composition rather… iffy. Still all in all it was excellent fun, and I will be shooting another roll soon, maybe even in the dark:
Posted by matt at 14:37
13 June 2010
Albert's Space Adventure
My year is finally over and so I’m going to be more free to do a billion and one things that preferably don’t involve deadlines, people called Alice and Bob or any form of knowledge about Oracle Databases.
For most of the year I was spending a large chunk of my time battling with my team to create a game for the PSP.
We created a 2D/3D platform game with an awesome storyline involving dinosaurs, highly trained space monkeys and cube shaped planets.
Seeing as the PSP development kit has now been shipped back off to Sony, and I will likely never get to play my years work ever again I thought I’d upload these couple of pictures here to remind me of both the achievement and the termoil.
Posted by matt at 11:36
20 April 2010
Olympus 35mm compacts
In the last few weeks I’ve ended up owning a couple of very similar looking 35mm compact Olympus cameras. Currently I’m extremely pleased with both of them, as they take lovely sharp photos without me even having to take a moment to think about shutter speeds or depth of field. Both of course have their eccentricities that cameras of such age shouldn’t go without. For example with both cameras if you press the shutter button too fast they seem liable to give you incorrect exposures, something which I’ve learnt through a series of spectacularly poor attempts by ASDA’s scanning to correct it.
35 ECR
The 35 ECR’s favourite eccentricity is taking now illegal 1.3V mercury batteries to power it. Spending 10 minutes bodging the battery holder with some paper and some tin foil allows you to put 2× 675 hearing aid batteries in one of the two slots, giving the correct voltage. Even then though the status lights seem to fade sometimes in completely unpredictable ways. Still as my test roll has shown me, it wasn’t affecting the exposure.
Trip 35
The Trip 35 on the other hand has a selenium light meter, and so no batteries at all! Unfortunately though, rather than the elegant rangefinder focusing mechanism of the 35 ECR, it has a rather antiquated feeling zone focusing mechanism. Sure there’s a certain charm to selecting either 1 person, 2 people, 3 people or a mountain to focus, but my god is it infuriating when your distance estimation isn’t up to scratch and all your photos come back slightly out of focus.
Posted by matt at 16:46
04 April 2010
The gigs of late March 2010
I shot a few gigs towards the end of last month, so I thought I’d pop up a couple of photos.
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra @ The Fleece
Why? @ Thekla
The Album Leaf @ Thekla
Both of those last two were shot on film, something I’m planning to do a bit more at upcoming gigs.
I’m thinking there might be a couple of portfolio worthy shots in there. In fact a portfolio site is being worked on over the coming weeks, and I expect a version online well before the end of this month! It won’t be brilliant to begin with, but it will be good to have one up that I can flash around.
Posted by matt at 22:49
