Broken Strings II
About a year and a half ago I posted a bunch of pictures of the local cover band Broken Strings in which my son plays. In October I was down at the Canoe Brew Pub for their weekly performance with my sister and her partner who were visiting from overseas.
I did not go equipped to take pictures, but I did have my Olympus XA in my pocket with black and white film in it. So, I took some shots by setting the camera on the table top, and firing it with the self timer. They were long exposures – a few seconds I think, though I have no way of knowing exactly how long. If the table was not jogged (which it was in the last shot) during an exposure then they came out remarkably clear, or at least the stationary gear did. The band members on the other hand are barely recognisable in only a few instances. Still, I like these pictures, and especially how the shiny table top blends into the stage surface as if it were part of the stage.
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Olympus XA, f2.8/35mm lens, Ilford Delta 400 Pro, scanned with Epson V700, exposure info not recorded.
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burnt embers 
I like these shots, too. I take a lot os photos of musicians and it’s nearly impossible to get a perfectly clear shot without using a flash. I see some folks using flash but I never use them during a performance but I don’t mind cranking up the ISO to get the shot but I have to put the camera in silent mode first.
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Hi Ken – thanks, I am glad you like them. In my previous broken strings post I cranked the ISO, ultimately I think up 6400 as the light failed (lots of natural light in this space in the summer) which was pushing it, but it did keep the motion blur out of the pictures.
The XA is perpetually in silent mode – just a quiet click with each shot, but not very versatile for these more extreme settings, unless I had loaded it with 3200ISO film, and even then that is only 3 stops faster and I probably would still have been out of hand-holding range.
Recently I was shooting a wedding in very confined quarters with 6 people present including myself and the officiant using my DSLR. I found it necessary to lock the mirror up and do everything through the back screen to reduce the noise and be unobtrusive as possible.
Fortunately it was a very wide angle lens due to the very small space so most everything was in focus most of the time and I did not miss too many shots – not ideal though. Not a situation for a noisy camera – a high quality mirrorless micro 4/3 with good electronic view finder would be a better instrument in the circumstances. One would work well for band photography too given that their quiet mode is really quite and there is still a viewfinder.
I had thought of getting an m4/3 camera, but in the end decided that small film cameras met most of my pocket-camera needs, and the money I had set aside for one could go to a DSLR lens instead.
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