35 years ago in 1990 when Judas Priest released the album Painkiller digital cameras were non-existent. Today we take it for granted that we can shoot 100’s of photos on our phones and instantly upload them to the internet, even editing with AI to make them look ‘great’. Way back then it was a completely different story… 36 shots on a film roll, manual focus, manual exposure, get them developed, get some prints. Get disappointed.
Having shot a lot of concerts over the years using digital, I decided it was time to take a film camera to the pit and see how it turns out. I loaded up my 1970’s Canon F1 + 50mm f/1.4 (50-odd years old!) with about 1 year out of date Ilford Delta 3200.
I used my digital camera in parallel and by checking the metering I could transfer exposure settings to the F1 to get the best chance of good shots. I managed to get through the roll of 36 (with a few shots away from the stage) spread across the 3 bands – Phill Campbell, CoreLeoni and Judas Priest. Most I shot at 125, 250 or 500/sec and f/2.8 with EI1600.
Today I had time to develop the film! And here are the results.
All 36 shots came out, but you get 35 in the gallery as I deleted 1 where a guy backstage walked right in front of me as I was taking a photo. What a lemon.
First, let me explain that I scanned with my phone using the Kodak Scanner App. And then edited in-phone to crop down to the actual image size – there is no cropping to re-frame the subjects. Then I let the phone auto-edit the exposure – normally I would do it manually in LightRoom, but I just wanted to see the photos fast!
And the results? The first shots were underexposed. That’s what I imagined would happen as the 2 support bands had poor front-lighting. Judas Priest had better lights, and hence better results. I was forcing myself to be at EI1600 and 1/250 sec f/2.8 – in hindsight I could have gone down to f/2.0 or f/1.4 without compromising the shutter speed.
Next, the auto-edit on phone shows up the grain a real lot. This is likely due to the increased contrast in the digital process to compensate for the ‘poor’ image. Maybe that could be improved doing it manually in LR.
The later shots (Judas Priest) are better. More detail in the shadows, but still a lot of grain from the auto-edit.
Don’t forget that these are all MANUAL FOCUS (as well as manual everything else too). I did not examine closely but they seem to be about ‘okay’ and not too blurry. Manually focusing with a checkerboard screen in poor light is hard, in fact impossible, so I had to judge by the overall image being somewhat in focus.
If you feel like, let me know what you think in the comments!
I think they look great! You had only 36 tries, and the JP pics are amazing. Something new, well not new but forgotten.. new for the younger crowd. Definitely cool idea! Horns up! \m/