Rammstein vs. old Olympus

Filed under: Concert — 3 Comments

May 1, 2013

Last night Rammstein were burning down Stozice hall in Ljubljana. Band probably doesn’t need any special introduction and their concerts are always theatrical including massive pyrotechnic displays combined with carefully choreographic performance, often insulting to some of the visitors, not taking care for any taboos and maintaining their controversial image.

As their concerts are always eye-candy, taking some photos for the family album is high on everyone’s list. If you go to concerts you know there are usually “no photography” rules and taking the cameras to the concert is forbidden. This rule however stays put most of the time only for the DSLR cameras while compact cameras are usually allowed. After all today’s smartphones make really great photos and it’s hard to forbid such devices at the venues like this. I had to argue a bit with a security guy at the entrance to allow me entering with my old compact camera, but I convinced him that everyone’s gonna take higher resolution photos than I will. So you are probably wondering what kind of camera I had with me?

It’s an 8 or 9 years old Olympus C-750uz compact camera I rarely used ever since I bought my first Nikon D70s. It is true that it only has a 4Mpx sensor but what it lacks in Mpx it gains in optics – with its 10x optical zoom (380mm SLR equivalent) it provides the photographer to be there on the stage so to speak, if not too far from it of course. The good thing about it is also the ability to manually set aperture and shutter speed as well as ISO.

However digital photography technology has advanced a lot in the past 10 years since this camera was first introduced. Just 4Mpx won’t let you make posters. ISO goes up to only 400 and the noise level at that setting is similar to ISO3200 on my Nikon D300. Powered by 4 AA-type batteries it is also quite energy consuming (hardly managed to make 100 photos in an hour and a half long concert). But still, as you can see from the photos attached to this post, even after so many years, it is still able to make decent photos in quite demanding lightning conditions.