Traces Of The Real

Hairy psychedelia from San Fransicso courtesy of Wooden Shjips– what can go wrong? Well the first thing would be that your cable release breaks immediately after setting up the camera. You have to use a cable release for long exposure shots on the 4×5 film camera I use. You press the cable release once to open the shutter and press it again a few minutes later to close it. You try and remember to take the darkslide out before doing so and put it back it when finished. I realised though that if I just kept the shutter open for the whole gig I could take photographs by sliding the darkslide out to start an exposure and sliding it back in to finish it. I used some tape to hold the shutter open. Amazingly this worked. If only I had been wearing a hat I could have hung this over the lens and taken it off when I wanted to start a shot and put it back to finish. Next time I’m definitely doing that.

The above shot is a 4 minute exposure, taken in Whelans on the 15th of April this year. Wooden Shjips were really good – yet another excellent band brought to our shores by u:mack productions. There are a couple of things I like about this photograph. You can see the hairy singers face on the right hand side of the shot. They had video projections going for the whole gig so there is something of the Sugimoto effect going on that I was talking about here. There is a strange vertical line going down through the keyboard player on the left but I’m still not sure exactly what that is. You can also see a photographer guy in the shot just at the front of the stage. He was spending a lot of time up the front shooting pictures. I wonder how they came out.