SXSW - Haru Nemuri

Explanation

tl;dr: f/1.7, 1/30, CineStill 800, 50mm

Before starting, why the collage instead of a single picture? I feel like all four of these pictures have interesting features that deserve to be talked about in relation with each other and want to highlight them as a group instead of individually.

At the end of both of the first two nights of SXSW music (Monday/Tuesday), I ended my night with Haru Nemuri. Honestly, even after seeing her twice, I still struggle to properly explain her music. Somewhat obviously, it's Japanese, with some affectations of Japanese pop music. But it's also hard hitting, harder hitting in person than recorded. It's raw, energetic, and beautiful. It's at some points hip hop, at others more ballad like. While listening to her recorded music gives a sense of some of the idiosyncracies of her performances, it ultimately does a disservice to her ability to energize a crowd and her ability to expend a what seems to be limitless amount of energy on expressing herself. It really reminds me about the best parts of live music and why I've missed it so much these past couple years.

Getting to the pictures, I took a few on Monday at Elysium where she was playing but ultimately wasn't satisfied with how they turned out. As a result, all of the pictures here were taken Tuesday at Cheer Up Charlie's on a different roll of film, CineStill 800T. One interesting thing I wasn't fully aware of when taking pictures with this film is how odd the colors can turn out depending on the lighting conditions. This particular film is graded towards Tungsten lighting or orange-y lighting and requires about a stop of compensation in blue-r lighting conditions (it says 500 equivalent), I assume to wash out some of the blue tinting the film will end up imparting. For these particular pictures, it doesn't really affect them much, but some of the pictures I took are heavily influenced by this and have a very unnatural blue-green tint to them that functionally ruins the pictures unless you do color correction. I'll state right here that I don't edit my photos, partially out of laziness, but also because I view my photography as a collaboration between my mind and the camera and in the case of film, the film's qualities. As a result, I don't really want to introduce something else to "fix" the mistakes I make when taking a picture. Since her outfit was a blue/white one, I actually don't mind the extra blue here. It definitely looks and feels a bit off, but honestly I don't actually mind and is something I'll want to keep in mind if I use this film again.

Let's talk about the vertical pictures first. Since I had already seen her show once the prior night, I knew I wanted these types of poses highlighted. Similar to the Mobley picture, they rely mostly on timing to capture my intent. I even actually took the pictures from a similar place, the front 2-ish rows right of stage. In some ways, they're similar to that one, though I think both of them capture more energy. Additionally, I think the more obvious addition of the crowd close up and out of focus gives a sense of her performance almost in a separate, other space which isn't quite captured by the Mobley picture, which while it still has the crowd at the bottom, it doesn't intrude much into the frame. Personally, I would want the second picture with her arm outstretched to be clearer, more similar to the upright first picture. But, I don't necessarily dislike the second picture, even with that "flaw".

Getting to the horizontal pictures, I moved much further back. In the Darkbird post, I mentioned images that can be taken from the back of a crowd. Before explaining these pictures I want to talk about why I moved back in the first place. Partially, this was the second time I had seen Haru's show in two nights and I didn't feel like I needed to be in the front the entire show. The other and more important reason though, was because some people ended up coming up beside me and were smokers and I hate the smell of smoke. It was an outdoor stage and yea, smoking's gross but allowed. I ended up maybe a bit closer than the Darkbird picture, probably 8 rows or so back, relatively centered, though a bit on the left. Unlike the Darkbird picture though, the outdoor venue at Cheer Up slopes a bit away from the stage instead of being flat. As a result, the people in front of me ended up being slightly elevated, only a couple inches, but enough to create the effect in the first picture of still feeling like being in the thick of the crowd even though there was no one really behind me. In the second picture, with all the hands up you get a sense of the energy of the crowd and, while not the most flattering facial image, there's a sense of the exhaustion and the energy from Haru that felt missing from that Darkbird picture.