How to photograph young musicians

How to get great shots with available light

Developing and printing
So you buy a great camera, use good film, shoot with a tripod, pay extra close attention to focusing and exposure, and then you drop your film off to some kid earning minimum wage looking very confused behind a big machine. Sounds crazy huh? But this is what most people do. And what's stranger is they get their photos back and wonder why they are such bad photographers. I wondered the same thing for a long time. I thought I had poor equipment or really bad technique. Then I shot a roll of slide film and took it to a pro lab. I was shocked when I saw these photos. I put them on the lab's light box and looked through a loupe at them. They were the sharpest things I'd ever seen. The colors were dazzling and the exposures were great (well, some of the exposures were great—slide film is tricky in this regard). The great thing about slide film is that there is no printing involved. The film just runs through the chemicals and becomes your slides. Done. No middle-man. With print film the film runs through the chemicals and becomes you negatives. Then someone or some machine must interpret the negatives and print them. That someone decides how red or green the prints will be. He decides how dark or light they will be. This person also has a large influence on how sharp they will be. The machines can be brutal with concert shots. They work in a similar fashion to your camera meter in that they expect everything to be average. Many concert shots have a bright area surrounded by darkness. The machines try to kick up the dark areas to make them "average" and in doing so turn the blacks gray and turn everything else into a large bright blob with no detail. So why do most people trust this to someone who knows very little about photography? Also, why do we think all of this can and should be done in an hour? Well, I guess it's cheap. To be fair, there are mini-lab operators that have figured out how to get decent results. They are the exception and if you find one buy them lunch and send them a cards on their birthday. If you can't find a mini-lab that makes you happy try a pro-lab. For b&w work the prices can be reasonable. Rather than paying a drugstore to make two bad 4x5s of every photo you shot, take it to a good lab and have a proof sheet made. The proof sheet is easy to store, fun to look at, and because all the pictures on the sheet have been printed with the same exposure you can get a good idea of how one photo's exposure compares with another on the same roll. All this will set you back about $14.00 a roll (Chicago prices); not much more than some mini-labs. When you've looked at the proof sheet and found the best shots you can go back to the lab and have a custom print made. Only now will you be able to honestly appraise your own work.

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