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So, last night was pretty interesting.
I went to Northbridge, which is the city's major nightclub/bar district - this will be important later - to take pictures of John Robertson's show, Don't Swallow, at the Blue Room Theatre. (Note to Perth folks: go see it! It's really good!)
I arrived about an hour before the show, so I could set up, work out light levels, etc. It turned out to be extremely fortunate, as I spent at least twenty minutes grappling with the fact that my tripod - which I'd never really used before - appears to be broken. The head just WOULD NOT stay on.
Fortunately, I eventually had the brainwave that I was in a theatre, and if there wasn't a roll of gaffer tape around somewhere, these people were doing it wrong. (Needless to say, when I asked, gaffer tape was procured in seconds.) So I taped the tripod head on place with adequate security for me to be able to use it, and proceeded with working out camera settings for the evening.
I ended up going for full manual mode, which felt all hardcore, but the conditions weren't right for automation - not just for the low-and-changing light levels, and the moving subject, but also the fact that sometimes the background was charcoal-coloured curtains, and sometimes it included a six-foot high white image of a hand - between them they threw out the camera's light metering crazily. (Also, John was wearing dark clothing but has white skin. My camera's software is crying right now.)
Whereas I could cope because I am awesome. I ended up going with a fixed ISO speed and aperture and adjusting to light changes with shutter speed variation (partly because I knew, from having seen the show, that he moved around less when the lights were lower).
Both John and I were assured by Jo, the stage manager, that if we got "two good shots" we had absolute and total success.
I'm pretty sure we got those two good shots - but it'll be fun picking them out of the 1,647 pictures I took.
*cough*
Personal highlights of the evening for me, before the later bit I'm going to tell you about:
- John, rehearsing a bit of the show he'd cut the previous evening because byplay with the sign 'terp took up so much (hilariously well-occupied) time, and which, therefore, I hadn't heard before, and grinning as I, still messing around taping my tripod into usability, was giggling in the corner all the way through. (Fortunately, having someone laugh at the jokes does not disturb the preparation of a comedian, or at least not John.)
- The one guy in the audience who wasn't far from me and my camera, who kept looking at me, and seemed to find it funnier if I was laughing at the jokes. I wondered if he assumed it *had* to be hilarious if the photographer was also laughing. (It is true that I laughed much less last night than I did the night before; I enjoy good jokes I've heard before, but I don't laugh as much, and in any case last night I was preoccupied with concentrating on my camera. I still laughed a lot. At least some of the pictures that came out blurry are John's fault for being funny. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) harveystoat I WOULD TAKE BETTER PICTURES OF YOUR COMEDY SHOW IF YOU DIDN'T KEEP MAKING ME LAUGH.)
- Feeling almost like a real photographer, as I tested light levels and shot options and so on. It's easier, in the digital age, I acknowledge that freely - I could take many hundreds of shots, I didn't have to change film, I could see how my pictures were doing by pressing the review button and *looking* at a small version of them, which is more than adequate for checking how light and colour balances are doing. But I was thinking about light, and composition, and photographing a performance I was attending classed as stage crew. (This was actually an important point; the show was sold out, but venue capacity limits allow for six stage crew in addition to the audience.)
- Being able to see the show for the second time, and pick which bits are spontaneous and which bits are scripted. I think John is a really gifted comic, because a lot of the stuff that feels spontaneous the first time you see it is stuff he's written in advance and is just playing really well, and the stuff that's spontaneous is consistently funny. (Seriously, Perth people, go see his show.)
After the show I copied off all the images I'd taken to Jo's laptop, then headed home. On the way back to the train station, my attention was caught by the sound of singing to acoustic guitars. Below the steps of the James Street Cultural Centre was pulled up a van, labelled on the sides for \DrugArm WA Information & Support. (Looking up their website, I see they're a Christian organisation, but they appear to be a Christian organisation in the "... and that's a good thing" sense.)
On the steps and around the area, a surprising number of people were gathered. A couple of children included. I took a couple of photos - I'll put them up later, right now I have to run to take my tripod back to the shop while they're still open today.
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So, I went back to my camera shop with my tripod in hand.
"I have a problem," I said. "The head of my tripod won't stay on."
"Won't stay on? Hm." The camera shop guy looked at the camera shop woman. "Maybe it needs to be screwed on?" he mused, unzipping its carry bag.
Taking it by the legs, he pulled it out of the bag.
Clunk.
The head fell off, leaving its inner bits exposed.
There was a pause.
"No," the camera guy said. "It's not supposed to do that."
So, he took it into the back and brought out a new one; the borked one will be returned to the manufacturers.
When I got home, Dean said that while she was pleased the people at my camera shop were replacing my stuff so readily when it was borked, she was concerned that they'd had to replace everything. I hastily explained that they've only replaced two things, one of those things being a $30 filter that was in fact perfectly functional, just not actually perfect, and the other being the tripod, which was broken in a way that they'd never even seen before. I wouldn't even have bothered to get the filter replaced had I not been at the shop anyway, for unrelated reasons, and thought to pull it out and show it to them.
And they remain really nice and helpful, and I like their service. In addition to my own experiences, I've overheard things like:
- A customer calling about buying a $2,000 accessory for his camera, to which one of the camera guys, asked by the person who took the call for his input, said: "It's not worth the money."
- A customer calling, and being told by the person taking the call: "No, if you're on your way and we know you're coming, we'll wait for you." This was today - they were about half an hour from closing time, but a young woman had called in desperate, urgent need of film, so the woman at the shop assured her that they would stay open past closing to sell her film. (The shop woman suspected she has an assignment she's left to the last minute.)
Me, I'm going to stay digital for my camera work until further notice, because not having to mess with film is really really nice. I can't see myself using film again unless I become a professional photographer AND can set up my own darkroom.
And even then... digital is better for some things. For example, last night I was working on an ISO speed of 3200, which is *really damn fast*. ISO 3200 is the highest my camera can go (it can fake it higher, but noise issues get serious). This is also the highest speed that you can get in film - except using it on my digital camera is trivial, and ISO 3200 is a nightmare to process.
You can't use a safelight in your darkroom - you have to handle it in TOTAL darkness. Afterglow from fluourescent lights or timer displays will fog the film. If you're taking it through an airport, say, you can't let it go through the X-ray machines. You have to keep it chilled when it's not in your camera. And getting decent pictures in lighting conditions that need ISO 3200 is already tricky.
Digital is my friend. I take pictures in low light, and it works fine. There is some ISO noise - I suspect less than film would produce - but it's auto-corrected by the camera, and if you're scaling down the images at all (which you pretty much have to, with images from a 15.1MP camera) then the slight loss of sharpness this causes becomes undetectable. And that's without taking advantage of all the post-processing you can do with image editing software.
tl;dr: I love my camera.
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