David Emery Online

Antisocial

12 September 2007

This evening I went to see the delightful Emma Pollock who put on an album launch for her new album “Watch The Fireworks” at The Social in central London. She was as good as ever, but I’m not really a fan of The Social which put a dampener on things somewhat.

I like the idea of The Social, with it’s relaxed demeanour and cosy interior, but when it gets full it turns into somewhere pretty appalling to actually see an artist perform. It’s just too small, really, and the shape around the stage is all wrong so there’s very few places you can stand and guarantee being able to see anything.

Of course, as ever I was trying to take photos which hit upon exactly this problem – getting close wasn’t an option as it was so packed, so I had to zoom in and duck and weave between the (rather tall) people standing in front of me. This was confounded by the utterly rubbish lighting they’ve got in there – I guess they’re trying to create a “mood”, but they essentially don’t have any powerful lights, meaning I had to either switch to ISO 800 (which is to noisy to be useful on my G7), use a long exposure (around 1/6s – 1/10s which is too long to hold handheld without causing blur, and doesn’t really work with people moving about, as they have a habit of doing on stage) or use a flash (which looks rubbish as I haven’t invested in a decent bounce flash yet).

The long and short of it is that to take any decent pictures (the 4 below were mostly down to luck – especially the last one which benefited from someone else’s flash) I need a better camera – one that works acceptably at ISO 800 – 1600 or has a faster lens when zoomed in (f2.8 would have been useful – I had to lump for f4.8ish). Of course, that would require trading up to a DSLR, which I’m very tempted to do, but I would seriously miss the portability of my G7; it lives in my bag all the time, and I have it everywhere I go.

What I would love is a compact camera – G7 sized – with a DSLR sized sensor and either the same lens as the G7 (which has a really nice zoom range) or changeable lenses, with the option for a “pancake” prime lens like Pentax make. I couldn’t care less for the whole mirror/viewfinder arrangement that DSLRs have, but it would be nice to have a decent electronic viewfinder. Bung in some in-body image stabilisation and you’d have the perfect camera, if you ask me…