Portra 400

Last roll of 2022. Unlike most rolls which have some extra pictures or are from different venues/sets, this one was taken entirely the same night at Empire. The three bands on display are, in order: Shooks, Animals on TV, and Die Spitz. Shooks largely takes up the upper left of the collage, Animals on TV the bottom left, and Die Spitz is to the right.

It’s been a while since I covered “the numbers” on a roll so let’s go over them. This roll had 38 pictures on it, 5 of which aren’t in this collage due to not quite fitting. Of the 38, I labeled 22 of them for being large in the collage, 16 small. All 5 of the removed ones were small. Split up further, I labelled 7 as bad, mostly for being either wildly out of focus or being difficult to discern a clear subject or subjects. Another 15 were ok, 4 I labelled as interesting, and 12 as good.

I’m not super surprised by these pictures overall. That’s a bit neither here nor there. At this point, besides colors I feel like I shouldn’t be too surprised by the pictures I’m taking. It definitely took a bit of practice earlier in the year to properly think through how to pre-visualize the images. But by this roll and now, that’s not really the case.

What I will say is that I leaned really heavily into longer exposures for this roll. There’s a lot of motion blur, both intentional and not. For some of these pictures, particularly some in the bottom and right, some of these pictures were 5, 10, or even 30 second exposures. For example, the one in the second row on the right side was a 20-30 second exposure that I took while resting my camera on some empty drink cans to the far right side of the stage.

Part of the reason why I leaned into the longer exposures, slower than 1/15s or so, is really just a function of the venue and lighting for these shows. It was a really dark set of shows overall. Also, instead of shooting 800 like quite a few of the previous rolls, this was my first 400 roll since May. Yes, I took that one roll of Fuji 200, but that was all daylight focused instead of low light. As a combination of a dark venue and a “slower” roll of film, I kind of needed to lean in.

That said, I still caught some really nice faster pictures too. One I really want to talk about is the 3rd picture from the left but not in the bottom row. Honestly, this is more of a fun moment than a great picture but I’m really glad it turned out the way it did.

The story behind it is that the band playing, Animals on TV, set up their show to be a kind of costume contest. They were playing the roles of villains, hence the masks over their eyes, in prep for their at the time upcoming single of theirs, Our Very First Pyramid Scheme. It’s out now and quite fun, go listen to it. Anyways, since there weren’t really many costumers, they decided to give the winner to someone else in the crowd, namely the man on stage who was dancing up a storm. The prize? A record (and a t-shirt). The record you see being smashed apart, at their request.

Honestly, when he went on stage I wasn’t really looking to take a picture. But at some point, I decided to put up my camera. I want to say it was right before this as they were starting to egg him into breaking the record. Either way, I didn’t get a solid chance to focus but I’m really glad I got to take the picture right as the vinyl is snapping and flying up. It’s a really cool scene and the lady with the hand up lining up with the mic stand works too.

I’ve described some of my approach to picture taking before. Namely, I tend to be a patient photographer as opposed to a reactionary one. I spend some time thinking about where I should stand and how I should orient myself. Then I look at what’s possible from that space, or others. And finally, I wait for the image(s) I’m envisioning to happen. I find this to be more effective than chasing pictures that aren’t possible from where I’m standing.

Obviously, there’s some amount of bias when I’m coming back and looking at pictures. This was a super fun show. All three bands had a lot of energy and the vibe of the crowd was great. Die Spitz, the last show of the night and an all girl punk band, was super exciting and the crowd was moshing at one point. I really wish I had a better picture of the chaotic, frenetic energy of the crowd. I think I caught some of it in the picture above the one I was just talking about. But that was during the first set of the night, Shooks. While also a great show, the crowd just wasn’t quite as chaotic yet.

One thing I will note about this roll is that a lot of these pictures have a purple line running through them. I’m not entirely sure if this is because of my scanner or not so it’s something I’ll pay more attention to in upcoming rolls. Personally, I don’t care that much, but it is something that isn’t consistent and I don’t believe is because of the film. It may also be part of the development process which I don’t have control of. Since I’ve been using the same developer for all my film, I want to say it isn’t because of that and is likely my scanner since I’ve only seen in on this roll and the one before it.

Anyways. That’s the last roll of 2022. I have a couple more posts to write to wrap up my thoughts on 2022 and what I’m looking to do in regards to film/instant photography in the new year. After that, more pictures, more bands, more experimentation.