Concert Photography Slideshow
Concert Photography Slideshow – all of these images were shot “analog” on color negative, transparency and black & white negative film. Shooting on transparency film left little room for exposure error – usually about a quarter to maybe half stop!!
When shooting concerts in black & white, my film of choice was Fuji NeoPan 1600, which I found worked best at an ISO rating of 800 which was processed in my studio darkroom using PKM (pyro-metol-kodalk). PMK was a developer you could “whip up yourself”, but I found the Photographer’s Formulary sold it in a powder “kit” you mixed into a stock solution and used at 1:200 dilutions. The pyrogallol was tricky to mix, but my magnetic mixer worked wonders. The developer had some unusual characteristics, most important was that it stained the fim base, appearing to color in between the film grain, giving the impression of a much slower ISO film. Chemically, PMK was a compensating developer, exhasting in the highlight, but working hard in the mid-tones and shadows. The printed results gave the illusion of a shimmery tonal range, despite having been shot in very contrasty concert lighting conditions. Most if not all my peers, shot concerts by usually pushing their Tri-X, one often two ro three stops – which in my experience, made a bad situation worse. Pushing Tri-X increased the contrast, but a concert is already contrasty, so you made a touch situation more difficult when it came to printing. Pulling my film, (Fuji NeoPan 1600) one stop had the opposite effect, but helping tame some of the contrast. I used similar techniques when shooting on color neg film and transparency film as well. Understanding the basics of film processing chemistry and what was happening inside your film processing tank played an important part in matching lighting conditions to film/developer combinations.
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