Portra 400

This 6th roll of Portra 400 is a bit unfortunate. Not necessarily because of the pictures which I’ll talk about, but because of my cameras. Yet again I have a couple of broken cameras. Again, this comes with the territory. 50-60 year old cameras are likely going to have issues and it happens, I’ve resigned myself to that eventuality. The first half of this roll was shot with one of my Minolta X-370s and made it pretty much exactly half way before the advancing lever stopped working. I actually just realized while writing this on a flight of all places, that I didn’t actually mention this in the previous posts. But yea, the advancing lever broke about half way into the 10pm slot of my last night of SXSW which meant I didn’t shoot the end of the festival.

As this is a music themed roll, let’s do a quick rundown of the different artists on this roll. To start is Housekeys, an experimental ambient artist who played at Central Presbyterian for a night themed around using plants as instruments. It was kinda wild and definitely weird. I probably should’ve taken the pictures with longer exposures to get bright images but I didn’t. Oh well. After that I went to see two shows at the Driskill, Olive Klug and Belén Cuturi. Olive Klug is indie pop/folk and Belén Cuturi is a Uruguayan singer. Both have a very chill and easygoing vibe to their music. After that was Mightmare playing at Valhalla. I capped the night off with Austin based Lola Tried at the Velveeta Room, followed by the Italian, her skin, and ended the night with fuvk both at Las Perlas. I didn’t have any pictures after the Mightmare set so those aren’t shown obviously. The bottom half of the roll is dedicated to the show with Tearjerk and Elise Trouw both of whom I wrote about in the previous posts.

Since Mightmare does take up a good chunk of this roll, let’s talk about them a bit more. The North Carolina based band has an intense and driving sound that feels both unnerving and somewhat intimate. It’s an interesting duality that is pretty uncommon. I really enjoyed their performance, even if it was a bit marred by technical issues that really messed up the vocals in particular. That said, I’m pretty happy about the pictures I took. The top right corner has a nice line composition with a fun motion cue. The next big picture below it is a clear triangle composition. To its left is a nice a/b split composition with the focus pulled to the back of the frame that actually works to pull you back there. Overall, an interesting and largely successful group of pictures.

Moving into those Tearjerk and Elise Trouw pictures, overall pretty good too. These are largely organized by color instead of sequential order because I thought it looked better. The two magenta double exposures on the right side are really powerful and fun. The solo drum picture and the solo guitar picture above it are really clean. Overall really nice.

All that said, overall the roll was a bit hit or miss. It ends up about 2/3 small 1/3 large and there are definitely some pretty meh pictures, especially towards the front of the roll. A lot of this comes down to me not being particularly aggressive with my positioning and some relatively uninspired lighting conditions. When you aren’t aggressive with your positioning and there aren’t interesting lighting or timing possibilities, there just isn’t a whole lot you can do to create interesting pictures. And quite frankly the front of the roll largely runs into those problems.

Now I promised I would talk about colors so let’s talk colors. This is once again another pushed roll and its colors are not really what I’d expect out of Portra. For that weird all orange picture, I know for a fact that there weren’t any orange lights during the set. That picture was taken with red lights. I mentioned that the magenta on the right side may have actually been red. I feel like there was also magenta during Elise Trouw’s set, I know there was during Tearjerk’s. But that said, I don’t remember enough to be certain there. That said, I don’t think the colors are so far off during those two sets. They’re probably more saturated than normal, but that’s likely because I didn’t scan these pictures. I let the place that develops film for me also scan this time. I did so because I wasn’t sure how long it would take and yea, I’m on a flight right now. I did end up picking up the pictures before leaving but I didn’t know if I would or not.

No, the colors are probably most off with that Mightmare set. I’ll grant you that the lighting was likely yellow, but nowhere near that yellow. Additionally, as we’ve seen in many of these pictures now, that SXSW banner is pink. Obviously, lighting can strongly affect the color of things, but I feel like I would’ve remembered the lighting being so yellow that I couldn’t tell the base color of the SXSW banner. (Side note, I took a look back and it’s pretty obvious in most of the pictures with the banner that it’s pink. The exception is in the Ladaniva pictures where it looks blue. That’s almost definitely because it’s too dark and so it’s hard to tell the color.) That said, I don’t think it matters that much. The colors being weirdly yellow don’t particularly negatively affect the pictures for me. But I thought I’d point it out anyways.

Let’s end this with recalling the beginning of this post. I said that I had two broken cameras but I only talked about one. Well, the other one is the Nikon FM that I used during the Tearjerk and Elise Trouw sets. It once again has that double shooting problem. However, it only has that problem if the lens isn’t wide open. This makes the camera pretty useless during the day but during these kinds of low light shows where you need a wide open lens it’s fine. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that since it seems like it might not be a permanently fixable issue. And on that note, I’ll end this post.