The curse of the big project

This past weekend I shot a concert and youth convention. In 12 hours of shooting, I racked up almost 3000 images on the Olympus E-1 as well as an OM-4T.  14 rolls of film were shot!  Remind me again, please, why I had the motordrive on the camera?

Big events require lots of pictures. First of all, there are the required "grip-n-grin" shots for awards, and special recognitions.  Secondly, there is the required coverage of the bands, special-guests and keynote speakers. Thirdly, crowd coverage!

A question can be asked, why 3000 pictures?  I normally wouldn't shoot anywhere near that many, except the stage lighting caused extreme difficulty in getting decent shots due to motion blur and the darkness.  The venue's house lights were off most of the time and the majority of the stage lighting spillage was from those LED tri-color lights.  What a miserable thing for photography those LED lights are!

My first pass at culling the images resulted in a 50% deletion rate for motion blur and misfocusing. In reality, this isn't too bad!  The second culling will get rid of another half of the remaining.  I'll probably have around 600 final images for the client.

I am very glad I shot film for this event. Stage lighting and digital don't mix very well and I have numerous images which the film version is much preferred.

Once I get to see a horizon again, I'll post samples.