Ragfest 2010 was the first instance of a hopefully long running student music festival taking place in the University of Bristol student union. I got in to take some photographs courtesy of the wonderful Photosoc.

I spent the evening switching between the two stages and seperately between my film and digitial cameras. Overall I’m reasonably pleased with the results and will undoubtedly slip a couple of shots into the online portfolio I am currently creating.

It really has highlighted however the limitations of my setup. With the low light in one of the rooms, my cameras manual focus (without the wonderful full frame viewfinders of old) and poor high ISO performance gave me little chance of the shots I was really searching for.

Even the shoot and hope technique of hitting the shutter button an overly large number of times wasn’t easy as my camera can really only take a couple of shots before the buffer runs out of space and I have to wait age for it to empty.

You can see an example of what I achieved in low light with the breakdancing shot above which I was vaugly pleased with – but it took a million and one terrible shots to get a shot like that. The black & white was also a necessity in order to mask as much of the noise as possible.

I guess it’s time for a new camera!