Traces Of The Real

This is the band Sleep Thieves, shot in Whelans on the 25th of March. Go to any gig in Whelans (and many other venues) these days and there will be a couple of folks with DSLRs shooting away at the front. Some of them take pictures for a few songs and then get out of the way, some of them hang around for most of the gig. Most of them are respectful of the fact that other people have paid in to see the band and try not to get in the way, but there are a few that seem to think the fact that they have a camera in their hands give them some kind of God-given right to be a dick.

Anyway, there were quite a few people taking pictures with flash at the Sleep Thieves gig and I suddenly realised that this would probably screw up what I was trying to do. A flash going off is a big burst of light – it’s designed to give the correct exposure for a simultaneous photograph taken at 1/60 of a second at f8 or whatever. If I am making an exposure of about 5 minutes and a whole pile of flashes go off during that time then surely their cumulative effect will wreck the shot? Well it seems that it doesn’t – the main reason I suppose being that since I am shooting at f32 and am quite a distance from the stage (at least compared to the photographers down the front) the effect of each flash is quite small.

In fact, it gives pretty interesting results. In the Sleep Thieves picture above you can see multiple images of the guy playing the bass on the right, including a quite clear one where he standing back a bit from the others. This was obviously not created because he stood in exactly the same position for 30 seconds or so. I think this is there because a flash went off and caught him momentarily in that position. I like this effect. It is completely unexpected and quite random. It’s almost as if a bunch of other photographers photographs have imprinted themselves onto mine.