Alright, I’ve given myself a few moments to calm down, but I saw something last night that infuriated me, and it infuriated me in a way that made me realize I am old.
This issue involves a concert I attended last evening. It was close quaters, intimate, featuring a rather (dare I say?) blogworthy band, Free Energy. I was with my mate, Dogs Playing Poker, and we were in a relatively good vantage. However, these charlatans crowded up in front of us, pointing at their enormous digital SLR cameras as if that gave them the right to stand in front, on virtue of wanting to take photographs. My friend was very dismayed at the audacity these clear amateurs (more on that in moment) had in storming in front, and it did not help that they were young attractive women. Probably blog writers too, what a rotten bunch.
So there’s that. What honestly steamed me over was that on top of their brazen lack of etiquette, they were rank amateurs at the pictures they were taking. Their flashes overwhelmed the subjects; any body appeared too white on a black background. One of them sat down and took nothing but low angle shots of the lead singer, whose hair was long a floppy and she never got the face. Ever. I know because I was right behind her and could see every one of the 400 or so shots, 300 of which were deleted immediately, on site.
Now I’m certainly not a practised photographer, but I know the basic elements of composition and took a class or two with my old Minolta 35mm back in the day (probably among the last trained analog camera operators prior to the rise of DSLR). Digital cameras allow such quantity over quality that it is absurd. Normally this is fine, and can help the budding cash-strapped enthusiast, but when you are stuck behind some self-important hack of a photographer that is literally snapping a flash off every 6 seconds (bear in mind here the flash was pointed upwards, directly at my face, in a effort to, i don’t know, wash the images out even more) then maybe you will wistfully recall a simpler time when you were limited to 24 frames on a single roll of Kodachrome, and had to make them count. If you are going to imposition your fellow audience members, at least do it for a good reason.
I’ll keep an eye out for those photos, and amend this post to mock them properly if they ever show up on the internet.
35mm @ 24fps sounds great, old chap.
be careful on that pedestal
You should have used the ol’ Jurassic Park on them:
“Miss, is that thing heavy?”
“Yeah, Kinda.”
“Then it’s expensive, put it back.”