Lomography 800

Let’s kick off the roll posts. As I said in the posts for Shooks and Hope D, this entire roll was shot with the Canon Demi S. It’s a roll of Lomography 800 which I’ve shot plenty of so not a whole lot to talk about there.

Overall, the roll is a mixed bag. Honestly, I went into it knowing that the number of good or great pictures were going to be low. What I will say is that I’m surprised by how well the focus turned out in general compared to the previous roll. A big part of that was just being more mindful of my distance and making sure the focus was closer to what it should be.

This roll covers my first 2 nights of SXSW starting with the Dutch new wave classical group Fuse. Overall a nice show, if a bit low energy from the crowd. The first 5 pictures of the roll were explicitly shot at different distance breakpoints so I could see the focus spread. You can find 4 of those in the middle right of the collage, look for the start of the roll “burn”.

After Fuse, I ended up seeing the French Canadian group Le Couleur at the outdoor patio at Swan Dive. For whatever reason, I ended up right up front and center for the show which was really fun. The pictures for this show cover most of the top of the collage. I really like the fluid movement in a lot of these pictures.

After Le Couleur finished, I went over to the 13th Floor to see Portland based foamboy. They surprised me with the trumpet. But I knew based on the lighting that any pictures would be pretty weird and not great, which is how they turned out. Those pictures are the pink lit ones on the right side. The light glow is really strong in these pictures which is a bit interesting but overall super distracting. Even if the focus were on point, the light glow is too distracting to make these pictures any good.

The large grouping of pictures covering most of the middle of the collage are all of Shooks, I don’t really need to cover that more.

Starting the second night is a single picture of Adam Dodson, an Austin based ambient instrumental artist playing at the Driskill Hotel’s Victorian room. This picture is just under the “you’re gonna miss me” which I’ll get to in a bit. Adam Dodson was really good. It was a nice and chill set which is welcome in a festival that can be really loud and intense otherwise. It also happened to be his first time performing live which was a treat. He did a great job and though the show wasn’t particularly exciting, I wouldn’t expect it to considering the music, it was still really engaging and worthwhile. The picture is a bit of a throwaway, I’m not gonna lie. It’s not terrible, but not inspiring at all.

mui zyu was up next, back again at the 13th Floor. Unlike foamboy, the lights were a lot more tame and though most of the pictures weren’t great, I did catch one that I think worked out. These pictures really show off that reflected light issue I brought up and are right around the Adam Dodson picture. mui zyu’s music is pretty difficult to pin down. It’s probably best to label it as experimental pop. Overall, a pretty interesting show with really funky music. Quick note, the “you’re gonna miss me” picture was taken during this set. I have a soft spot for neon and really wanted to capture it with someone seated but having absolutely no fidelity of the person, enshrouding them in darkness. I think it turned out about as well as I could’ve expected.

To the left in bright blues and reds are pictures of Miss Grit. Probably best described as pop rock, the music and show was good, if not particularly spectacular. There were a bunch of delays and tech issues which delayed the show which was disappointing. Apparently I just didn’t meter these pictures right because the lighting is all kinds of crazy. The pictures were taken at an outdoor venue called The Venue ATX, real original, and I was up front. The stage however, is about 4-5 feet off the ground so every picture gets a bit of that up turned heroic look to it. The exposures and lighting are just so crazy in these pictures that it’s hard to really take them super seriously.

Now, my original plan was to go see Haru Nemuri again at the same venue after Miss Grit’s set. But with the tech delays and other issues at the venue, I just decided to move on and head to see River Boy at Las Perlas. River Boy is the composer behind the soundtrack of Cult of the Lamb, a video game that is a lot of fun. I was really curious to see how that soundtrack translated to a live set and wasn’t let down. He put together a really high energy and exciting set blending common electronic music mainstays like the soundpad with electrical guitar and flute. Altogether it was a super interesting and unexpectedly fun set. That said, the sound was crazy loud and I probably hurt my hearing a bit. There are a few shows where that probably happened which I’m not too happy about.

One more thing to say about that River Boy set at Las Perlas. Those blue lights that you see weren’t really blue. I took those pictures entirely expecting that lighting to look pink/purple-ish. The blue was visible to the eyes but shouldn’t really be visible to cameras. The reason for that is that the blue was actually UV light, not normal visible light. The effect of that was that white objects were lit blue, but nothing else turned blue under those lights. It was super weird because I remember trying to take a picture with my phone and everything looking normal, no blue. All this to say that I guess Lomography 800 can capture UV light at some level? I talked to one of the techs and he said he cranked up the UV so I know that that’s the cause, but I do find it interesting that it rendered the colors in this way.

Anyways, after River Boy I went down to Augustine to finish out the night. I saw Hope D who you can read more about in a previous post. But to end the night I saw the Austin based Pleasure Venom. With strong vocals featuring what can only be described as shrieking, Pleasure Venom is a high energy rock outfit that is honestly just exciting to watch and listen to. In my opinion, to cap off a night it should either end with a bang or be really chill and Pleasure Venom definitely brought it, even at 1 AM on a Tuesday night. I’m glad they came out even with how crap SXSW can be with compensation.

Overall, the roll was interesting and while the ratio of small to large, bad to good pictures is pretty poor, I learned a lot more about how to shoot with this camera. It’s a super fun camera to shoot and I think I’ve dialed in my distances a lot better now. Hopefully that means in the future the pictures with this camera continue getting better. But, even if they stay this way I can be pretty satisfied. I think I’ll transition this camera to be more experimental and do more stuff that I wouldn’t normally try as I did on the previous roll. All in all though, this roll proved to me that you can take good pictures, but you have to be mindful and care even more than usual.