I was recently in Oberhausen, Germany, to see Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir and brought my Minox 35GT loaded with Ilford XP2. Norwegian DImmu Borgir’s excellent main act was preceded by equally excellent Amorphis from Finland. And Amorphis, in turn, was preceded by a more recently established band with the evocative name Wolves in the Throne Room that was also very good (incidentally, Amorphis was founded in 1990 and Dimmu Borgir in 1993).
I only quite recently began listening to various sorts of black metal. It is a completely logical extension of my musical taste which I usually define as “good music”. So if something catches my, well, ear and it happens to be symphonic black metal, well then so be it; I will listen to it. It is fun music to listen to, too, and more melodious (at times) than one might at first think. Plus, much like certain types of techno music, it’s great to have in your ears in order to focus on a particular task, like writing (in fact, I’m listening to Sceptic Flesh’s excellent Portrait of a Headless Man right now).
I chose the Minox 35GT because it’s a very small (10cm wide, 6cm tall and 3cm deep) and light (200g) camera. It is also made of a very sturdy plastic material and features a drawbridge cover over the lens, all of which I though could come in handy at a black metal concert. It is an aperture-priority camera with manual focus so I simply set it to f/2.8 and infinity and exposed the film at EI800. Since most of the shots would be heavily backlit I sometimes activated the 2x function, which doubles the shutter speed.
Point. And. Shoot. It doesn't get simpler than that.
Since the Minox has a 35mm lens I needed to be fairly close to the action, so at the risk of incurring the wrath of shorter black metal fans I moved as close as I could to the stage. The film was developed in HC-110(B) as described in a previous post and scanned on my Coolscan 9000.
