SXSW - Pastel Ghost

Explanation

tl;dr: f/1.7, 1/8 + bulb (2-4s), CineStill 800T, 50mm. I prefer the film pictures over the digital ones.

Thursday was a bit of a weird night. I started the night later than intended because I had a headache in the afternoon and wasn't prepared to go downtown and listen to loud music with a headache. After a nap and some food and water, the headache subsided and I decided to go down late and catch what I could. Originally, my schedule had me trying to see Sinead O'Brien, but I think because Wet Leg was playing right after, the venue was completely packed and I ended up skipping that and going to see Bad Bad Hats at an off time instead. This further lead me to seeing Pastel Ghost on Thursday, which wasn't really part of what I had originally scheduled. It also allowed me to see Pastel Ghost again on Friday at a different venue. With that said, the scheduling ended gave me a good set of pictures to look at and talk about.

While I took 7 pictures of Pastel Ghost on Thursday with varying levels of personal satisfaction, honestly I ended up quite happy with all of them, I only really want to talk about 2 of them. I'll also talk about a couple of the non-film pictures I took on Friday as a point of comparison.

Before talking about the pictures, let's talk about Pastel Ghost and her music. Pastel Ghost, in some ways like Haru Nemuri, makes music that's a bit hard to explain. Her Spotify includes one word, dreamrave, which while descriptive is also not useful if you're not sure what it means. To me, her music is a combination of two main things. One is a strong rhythmic electronic beat and the other is her ephemeral voice. I'm not going to lie and say I can fully understand what she's singing, and honestly I'm not entirely convinced that understanding her lyrics are the point. Instead her vocals serve as a counterpoint to the heavier and generally more domineering electronic beats. As a show, she navigates a laptop, synths, and other effects processors while singing and running a light show that is at times entrancing and hypnotic.

Now to the pictures. The venue Pastel Ghost played at on Thursday was the Mohawk indoor stage, which is quite a small space. For that night, there was also a smoke machine going too which may have affected the images. If it did, I actually think the effect works. When the show started, the lights went way down and honestly I wasn't sure if any picture I took would work, it was really dark. For the first picture, I just tried to time the lights with a somewhat long exposure (1/8 of a second) to hope I caught some of her lit up. I definitely thought that that strategy wouldn't work so the resulting picture was a significant surprise. While definitely grainy, I find the graininess quite appealing. It gives it a somewhat vintage appeal, but also a sort of haziness that both matches the smoke machine and the dreamlike quality of her music. As an overall image, it feels mysterious or perhaps brooding. The lack of facial detail doesn't really detract as it's mostly an atmospheric image, which again fits her style of music.

For the remaining picture, and the other 5 I took on this roll of film for Pastel Ghost, I employed quite a different strategy. My thought process was that I was unlikely to get a lot of facial detail. Even though I couldn't look at the previous picture, I knew that it was going to be a struggle to get a clear picture. So instead I wanted to play up the dreamy/ghostly/ephemeral aspect, both of her stage name and of her music. To achieve that my goal was to largely abandon focus as an option and rely on time. My Minolta caps out at a 1 second shutter length before going to bulb. I think the second picture I took, out of the 7, might have been on 1 second but all the remaining pictures were of varying bulb lengths of 2-6 or so seconds. Why did I settle on the picture up top instead of one of the other 5 pictures? I think it's because I feel like it best encapsulates that ghostly feeling I was trying to achieve. Interestingly though, the way it does this isn't quite how I expected it to happen. Instead of her motion creating blurring or afterimages due to strobing lights, it is instead my involuntary shaking that causes the effect. Yes, there is a shadow to the right of the picture which is likely due to her moving during the lights strobing. But largely the effect happens due to a doubling effect where I must have jerked the camera on cue with a light strobe. My experience with unsteady hands has largely been a negative one, making things blurry or otherwise unreadable. Here however, it does what I was aiming to do, even if it wasn't planned quite as such. To me, it's a great lesson that sometimes an idea can lead to a great image, even if when you're taking that image you don't believe in it. This isn't to say that you shouldn't think about or intentionally take your pictures, but to say that it can be worth believing in your ideas, even if you aren't sure you believe in the execution. It can still surprise you.

To cap this off, let's talk about digital photography as a foil to the film photography I'll be talking about mostly here. On Friday, I saw Pastel Ghost again at Higher Ground and took my digital camera, a Sony a6000 with a 56mm (85mm equivalent) Sigma lens. I honestly thought that none of the pictures I took the night before were gonna turn out great so I wanted another chance. A couple things to note: The lens I was using is a f/1.4 lens that takes in light extremely well and is very clear. Also I took more pictures (15) and still felt like I could distill down to 2 pictures. In reality, I actually prefer the film pictures over the digital ones. Whether you do or don't is your preference but I'll explain why I prefer the film ones.

In both pictures, the focus is more tightly on her face. Not only that, but the facial detail is significantly better. This can be explained in a couple of ways. One, as I said earlier, this is a really sharp lens. Also since it's a lens that supports autofocus, even though I didn't use autofocus to take this picture, I was allowed greater ability to hone the focus, due to digital manual focus assist (I'll explain why I don't really like using autofocus some other time). Two, the venue simply wasn't as dark. You can tell in both pictures that the walls are effectively wood planks instead of the black painted boards at the Mohawk the night before. As a result, the light bounces more and lights the space more allowing for more light and more leeway in terms of shutter speed. The two pictures below are both shot at "800 ISO", the first with 1/60s and the second with 1/15s. The focus being more tight on the face is largely a factor of the lens being a longer focal length. This does two things, it "zooms and crops" to a smaller amount of my view and it makes the lights in the background seem closer to her. I'm actually standing a bit further away in these two pictures than the ones at the top of the page and also, to be fair, the stage was a bit smaller and the lights were actually closer to her, though not quite as what it seems like in these pictures.

Of the two pictures, I prefer the first one. It has less facial detail but the effect of the laptop screen lighting her face is quite nice. The second one isn't bad, the facial detail is pretty good but while lit decently well, the picture feels a bit flat and lacking in personality, without much other context would you be able to say much about her performance or type of music?. In all honesty, both of these pictures and all of the ones I took with my digital camera felt lacking in personality. I even tried to capture a couple images quite similar to the ones I took the night before but they ended up blurry messes that were unreadable, like how I described I was afraid of. To that end, I don't necessarily think that that's the fault of me taking pictures with a digital camera vs film. I think it ended up being a factor of both the venues and the lenses that I used. In some ways, the only pictures I could really comfortably get with my digital camera and the lens I chose were in fact the ones I got, sharper, better lit, more in focus, but lacking in personality. Now also don't get me wrong, I also noted how much I felt the film grain actually worked in its favor for those pictures. Ultimately, this side by side really makes me want to explore this difference more and really hone in on my feelings. But for now, with the way things went, I do prefer the film ones more. They feel like they express more personality and more nuance, which to me is what matters. (Side note: I find it interesting that the film images show the individual bulbs in the tubes while the digital images just show the entire tubes glowing, I'm not completely sure why that is)