f1.4

It looks weird, doesn't it? An Olympus E-1 camera which has more electrical gubbins than you could fathom in your wildest imagination, paired up with a manual-focus Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens, not a new one which costs £229 from Microglobe,
but a cheap (£38), mechanically identical thirty year-old one which a French ex-pat living in Japan sent to me this month.

It's the culmination of my adventures in low-light photography. It's been two weeks and a year since I first posted a half-way decent low-light picture of Emma Rugg on this blog. An entire DVD of Emma pictures wiser, I find myself tackling the challenge of low-light photography very differently indeed.

Everything, now, has gone back to basics: full manual exposure control, metering-by-guesswork, shooting RAW to bypass the image-processing engine, and black and white conversions to eke out every pixel of available information. An old-fashioned lens made before either Den or I were born, mounted onto my camera with something that was most likely cobbled together in a shed, seemed the natural thing to do, more natural, at any rate, than paying extortionate money for the nearest modern-day equivalent.

So, here, a year on, are my latest attempts at photographing musicians in the dark: two of McWatt, an accordion and flutist duo who featured on the Seeds and Bridges festival:





- and, just to give Den the chance to show he can deliver the goods after his last incredulously bad attempt, one of Fonda 500 also.