Sam Weber Band IV
This is the Sam Weber band playing last weekend.
I think the camera could not handle the 3200ISO DX coding because it was all very much underexposed.
Looks like the Olympus mjuii defaulted to 100ISO, 5 stops slower than expected. This is even though the camera is advertised to shoot up to 3200.
There are some OK pictures, very minimalist due to the loss of most of the mid tones, but overall a disappointment.
The 800ISO colour film I also used handled things much better.
I have previously taken pictures of this group on film which can be found at Sam Weber Band, II and III.
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Olympus mjuii, Ilford Delta 3200 (exposed at 100ISO??). Film developed commercially, scanned with Epson V700, edited in Lightroom.
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burnt embers 
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First – thank you both for the kind words.
Looking at the exposure graph for this camera (did try and paste a copy here but it refused !) it will force f2.8 until it thinks you are safe with speeds above 1/125sec and there is nothing you can do that will change its mind……. also It seems to be a rather wide averaging exposure meter so again ‘camera says no !!’ and the instruction manual indicated that it is definitely not a low light camera. All in all you have done very well with getting a few usable images, maybe more if you had developed it in a two bath developer which would have controlled the highs without loss of shadow detail.
Ha the fun that can be had with film 🙂
David.
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Thanks David for the information. I had looked for the exposure data but not found it. I have a manual for the camera but did not see that in there. From what I have read, with people fiddling with the camera is that it seems to have three spots that it meters and averages. However, the centre of the three can be put into spot meter mode. What the angle of view is I don’t know, but it does seem to be very narrow if my exposures are to judge by as I used it almost exclusively in the spot metering mode.
The manual also indicates it is not for professional use, though I know of some professionals that use this camera a lot (Phil Kneen for one). I guess it is what you make of it – I think it performs in low light situations far better than most point and shoots that I own – main competitors, though I have not tested the idea, might be other Olympus’, such as the XA and XA2 and they don’t have a spot meter mode.
I still have not embarked on developing my own film. I really must do that, but time always seems short to get the ball rolling though I probably would spend less time processing film than I do driving downtown to drop it off, and again to pick it up. I have been reading and looking at results of some film that is pushed to high speeds and some of them shot at higher speeds (like ~12,000ISO) seem to be less grainy with the right development than this film shot at 3200. It would be interesting to try some of those approaches as well, with a fully manual camera.
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that’s the thing about shooting film isn’t it … we’re always learning new things!
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Thanks Ashoke – indeed learning is always going on. David’s comment below makes me reconsider my analysis, especially since he is a very experienced film shooter (if you are looking for great film photography, check out his blog – more are digital these days, but the photos are uniformly terrific). Perhaps the camera was behaving just how I was asking it to, and my results are a combination of method, film and poor lighting.
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Thanks for the link to David’s work … I could not find a better phrase for describing his photographs other than uniformly terrific 🙂
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Actually this looks a very good atmospheric image and especially so for high speed film; if you have a problem with it then you have been using digital longer than you should 🙂
David.
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Thanks David – I have tried to reconfigure my expectations since starting back shooting film! There are many things I like about this shot. My comments arise from the totality of the 36 exposures very few of which have much to offer, especially even when compared to the 800 ISO colour negatives which have much more information.
Even so, the lighting was poorly suited to any kind of photography (though I have seen some very good digital images from this concert). I still can’t figure out if the camera was confused – it has a spotmeter (yes, an point and shoot with a spotmeter) but there are no specs I can find on just how narrow the spot is. I was assuming not very narrow, but since I was metering off faces which were the brightest things out there, and the subject I wanted in focus since I assume it was going to be using f2.8, it is possible that it was working as I asked it too – the faces are usually pretty well exposed, sometimes a bit over. I have shot this film (and the same band) in a better lit hall with exposures taken off faces and those shots were better exposures, though perhaps not a lot different when it comes down to it (they are the first link I list in the text).
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hang on … if you were (spot) metering off of the bright parts, won’t that cause the camera not to use f2.8 (considering ISO 3200)? Looking at the depth of field in the shot, I guess the camera chose a larger value aperture … just saying … 🙂
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Well, it is possible but the point and shoot cameras are often not clear on whether they are shutter priority or aperture priority. Many of them are shutter priority to avoid camera motion which must be the most common cause of out of focus shots. In a camera like this one, with 35mm lens the camera could choose a smaller aperture and work the shutter down to about 1/30th before moving to a larger aperture. But I don’t know how it works for this particular model, and finding out is not too easy.
However, there was much more light when I first shot this band with an SLR in another hall and I metered that one by hand, again from the skin. In that place I was shooting f2.8 at around 1/60th to 1/100th. Given that there was a lot less light and many of the shots are blurred, I am guessing that the mjuii camera was shooting at f2.8 most or all of the time with shutter speeds of 1/30th down to perhaps 1/2 or 1 second.
The wide-ish angle lens at these distances will give a useable depth of field, even at f2.8. Check my first post for this band much of which was shot with a 100mm lens at f2.8 and about the same distance from subjects – you will see the depth of field is more constrained (but still useable), as it should be.
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yes, the wide-angle lens and the 35 mm format do account for a deeper depth of field … 35 mm P&S’s are tougher nuts to crack … manual control is king 😀
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