film camera

Downtown Boys & dealing with red lights + color film

Blog, Pocket Full Of Fatcaps

collage_20151029150140835_20151029150930490_20151029181026558As a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft I know Providence in Rhode Island, and when i travelled to New York i managed to find some time to go there, where Cthulhu lives 😉

For me this was the only reason to know something about this city, but now, Downtown Boys are another good one!

They planned a gig in Milan and (fortuntately) I was there taking some film pictures. The venue “Sotto la Sacrestia” is not so big, so i took up my Yashica EZ View with its 30mm lens.

You can understand my disappointment when i noticed that the show was lighted only in red!!!

Fortunately I choose a P&S camera with AF and built in flash (Yashica EZ View) and I didn’t need to take care of the adverse light situation, but, once scanned the negatives, i noticed a subtle reddish glow on the skin of the musicians making them appear like boiled lobsters!

I was also using a roll of AGFA Vista 400 (that has warm and saturated colors) and so the effect was further amplified

Artifacts

Artifacts caused by adjusting only the red channel to increase skin brightness

As we all know B&W is the “big saviour” for this kind of things so i decided to convert all the photos!
Here it comes the second problem: the areas lit by the red lights were darker than usual! I’ve tried to brighten them by boosting the red channel but was unsuccessful! This because the neighboring areas, illuminated by the white light of the flash, were not affected by this adjustment causing horrific artifacts!

In my opinion, the best thing to do, was to boost the white balance temperature to have all the warm colors affected with a “red veil” and then boost the red channel to increase the brightness.

Scanned color film (Agfa Vista 400) -> B&W straight conversion (dark skin tone) -> B&W with WB & red channel correction

In the sequence: scanned color film (Agfa Vista 400) -> B&W straight conversion (dark skin tone) -> B&W with WB & red channel correction

About the band:

Their gig was a blast: english and spanish lyrics, politically driven, punk attitude and a saxophone!!! yes a saxophone, I never thought I could love so much this instrument in a punk band! I must say that their show was so engaging and full of energy that I regretted very much not to know the lyrics to sing out loud!

Check the photo gallery scrolling down and do yourself a favor: listen to the album and go see them when they play nearby!!!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYY0BMnM-1/?taken-by=buzz.mg