Photos: Capturing A Favorite Local Band With The Nokia N82

Saturday night was a great night for me. I got a chance to go see one of my favorite local hardcore/metal bands called Taken. These guys were around for awhile, and I went through my second half of highschool seeing them month after month. Keep in mind I'm 23 years old. Taken broke up a few years ago and it was a huge bummer for their loyal fan base. A few months ago they announced a reunion show, and I had to make it.

This would also be the first time I got a chance to use the Nokia N82 to a concert. I know I promised you guys Foo Fighters pictures from when I saw them last Thursday (which was amazing), but the seats I had were too far up and not facing the stage making the N82 useless. Too bad it doesn't have optical zoom. I got about 20 shots of Taken playing on Saturday and a good handful of the other band that played as well. Before you scroll down and look at the slideshow I'm gonna describe the nature and atmosphere of the show. Emotions were high, kids were rocking out everwhere jumping around everywhere stage diving and mosh pitting. I was hanging onto my N82 for dear life. The air was muggy and moist and the lighting was dark with occacional bursts from the strobe lights. Because of the random lighting the N82 sometimes blurred the photo. I personally like the effects the lightning gave to some of the photos.

I uploaded these to OVI Share, which is Nokia's version of Flickr. If you want to see a picture bigger simply click on it during the slideshow and it will take you to the Ovi website where all the images are located. Check out the slideshow below, there are about 20 photos.



Some of the pictures may not look like it but the Xenon flash proved to be a huge help. Without the flash the N82 gives off, a lot of these pictures would be extremely grainy and dull. The camera performed well especially under these lighting conditions. My hand was always up in the air being shaken around when I took these. It was crowded and the crowd was moving. In some of these shots I thought I was gonna get trampled by flying bodies.

In the past I would use a 5 megapixel Samsung digital camera to get these shots. The photos came out just as good, some maybe better. The N82 out performed the digital camera in a few ways. For one the digital took forever to take the show once I push the shutter down. Then when it was finally captured it took almost 20 seconds sometimes to process the image. I think the digital camera didn't like the lighting of the room. The N82 on the other hand was extremely fast. The shutter would go off and the camera would be ready for the next shot in five seconds. I turned off the "show captured image" setting since I need to save battery life. Thats another thing the Samsung camera sucked at - battery life. With it struggling to get these shots and process them, the battery would be dead in a half hour.

And now for the video. This is where the Nokia N82 failed. It got some great video footage and the quality is acceptable, even with the lack of a light. But one thing killed it - the audio. Of course this is harsh to critisize because it's such a loud environment in a room about the size of a large living room, but a regular digital camera or camcorder would have got me much better sound. The N82 with it's 30 frames per second video recorder should have came with a much better microphone. Everything in the videos I took just sound way too high pitched, you can't make anything out - at all. 100 percent unusable. Next time I decide to record a video of live music in a small room up close to the speakers I'm gonna bring a stand alone sound recorder and just keep it in my pocket. I've seen some concert footage with the N82 before and the sound was good. But thats because the phone wasn't up close to the band and speakers. I was at any given time between 1 foot and 10 feet from the speakers. I may end up overlaying the real cd audio tracks from a song on top of the video footage I got. I should be able to match it up pretty well.

While I got all this footage, it's amazing that the N82 had an extremely low battery. I wrote yesterday about how I handled the problem, click here if your interested in reading this.

What do you think of the photos? Of course I should brighten up some of them with Ovi's editing tool. I may post some retouched samples tomorrow. If you have any shots of live music email them over to me so I can check em out and show them off here at the blog.