i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

Here is the most important thing to know about the Josh Ritter show at the Cat's Cradle tonight: the hipsters danced. The hipsters in the CH don't dance, but tonight the hipsters danced. And they sang at the tops of their lungs. And they had actual emotions! It was a goddamned motherfucking miracle.

I'm loopy with joy and exhaustion, and I couldn't have asked for a better set list if Josh had let me write it myself:

Mind's Eye
To the Dogs or Whoever
Wolves
[a long digression about the nice weather in the South, and how Josh enjoys seeing all the exposed flesh, and possibly someone in the crowd flashes him at this point, because he thanks someone for "doing that"]
Good Man
Open Doors
Come and FInd Me
Me & Jiggs
Wait for Love
Snow Is Gone
The Temptation of Adam
Girl In The War
Rumors
Right Moves
Long Distance Call
Wildfires
Empty Hearts
Kathleen
--
You Don't Make It Easy Babe
Lillian, Egypt*

He remains one of my all-time favorite live performers -- there's just something about someone who so genuinely enjoys what he does every single night, genuinely enjoys his fans enjoying his music. Josh Ritter is fucking amazing. Easily a top five of 2008 set. (Revised list, in order: Truckers in Richmond, Josh at the Cradle, Weakerthans at the Cradle, Jason at the Berkeley, RRRGLT in whole.)

* now with more juggling of apples during a piano break. i don't even know. it was magic.

This is an issue that has been festering in my brain for a few weeks, both due to experiences in person here in the Triangle and with regard to photos I've seen recently on LiveJournal, and since I nearly blacked out with rage in the middle of Josh Ritter's set last night -- a set I'd been looking forward to for weeks -- it seems like as good a time as any to post this. Especially with bandom being such a huge fandom and so many people going to concerts, I feel like I need to say this. I'm not picking on any one person, I'm just telling it like it is, okay?


And this is how it is: it is impossibly rude to use a flash on your camera, be it point and click or SLR, in a small (<500 person capacity) or a mid-size (<2000 person capacity) concert venue, especially if you are in the first few rows of the crowd. It is rude to the people around you -- I choose to shoot without a flash because, for one reason, it captures the color better, and when you put your flash in my photos, that is rude behavior -- and it is incredibly rude to the performers. Using a camera flash in a small concert venue makes you a fucking asshole. Point blank.

I know I sound like somebody's mom, but honestly: just because everyone else in the room is doing it doesn't mean you should. I'm not exempt: I've used my flash at shows before, primarily in cases where there were so many flashes going off that it was damn near impossible to keep it out of my color anyway (which just made me part of the damn problem, made me an asshole myself, and I'm ashamed that I did it) and in cases where I knew the band personally and cleared it with all of them before I took the photos. But like your mama told you: if everybody else jumped off a cliff, would you?

"But my photos suck without a flash" is the most common refrain I've heard from people who shoot with a flash in small venues. Yeah, they probably do. I'm sorry. It sucks hardcore. But bad photos aren't an excuse to be rude to everyone else who's there trying to enjoy (or play) a show. I'm sorry, they're not. A flash standardizes light, makes a venue look like your living room. And it gets in my face and it gets in the performers' faces, and it makes me want to kill people. I know it is hard to take good concert photos with a point and click camera without a flash. It's not impossible, but it's really, really tough. I know because I tried to do it for four years before I got my SLR. But just because it's tough doesn't mean you should be using your flash, either.

( case in photographic point )


It sucks hardcore that most point and clicks won't give you a lot of good concert photos without a flash. It does. I understand that people just want to take pictures of the things they see. And some bands don't care, and in arena venues, it's a moot point because unless you have a crazy zoom lens or you're in the front row or the photo pit, your photos are going to suck regardless. Yours will, mine will, everybody's will. (And if you're in the photo pit, you're going to hopefully have enough gear and enough sense to not use a flash anyway.) But that doesn't change the fact that using a flash in a show is rude, tacky, and poor photographic sense. It is. It always has been. It always will be. I shoot in venues where the light is too shitty for me to shoot without a flash on the SLR. It sucks, I shoot without a flash anyway, and thus my photos in those venues are bad, or they're non-existant because I don't even bother to take them. I've burned whole rolls of underexposed film in low-light venues. It sucks. The only thing I can tell you is that if you want better concert photos, you need a better camera, and you need to learn to find and use the light that's available to you to make them work. You need to learn to be a better photographer. That sucks, too. Not everybody wants an SLR just to snap a few shots at a concert. But photos taken in concert venues without a flash are across the board more interesting and more alive than photos taken with a flash.

And to hammer the refrain home: shooting with a flash is fucking rude. Stop doing it. Because when I look at your photos and I can see you stood in the front row and used a damn flash, a lot of respect I might have had for you as a human being is gone, regardless if you're Mother Theresa or the Pope in your other life. You probably don't care about that -- I mean, who the fuck am I? But it's true all the same, and I'm a photographer who's serious about what she does, and if you use a flash on your camera in a small venue and promptly get smacked upside the head with ten pounds of Nikon SLR and Quantaray zoom lens, that was me, and you fucking deserved it, you fuckstick who just got your flash all over my goddamned stage color.

ETA: This got linked by dotcoms_refresh, which is just fine, but I'm not going to be able to keep up with answering comments from here on out. I'm reading them and feel free, of course, to continue discussing, but I likely won't be able to respond. No offense meant at all; I'm just glad that people are interested in my pissed-off ranting.