Radiohead on 35mm at Madison Square Garden

Back in July, I headed to New York City for most of a week to catch – among other things – one of Radiohead’s very few headlining U.S. dates of 2016. I was in the general admission pit for the English art-rock icons’ second night at Madison Square Garden, though regrettably not in the photo pit for either. I’ll not go on at length about the show itself, since it was months ago at this point and this pair of gigs are up there with Springsteen’s River tour as 2016’s most widely-covered live music events, but I will say that hearing “Creep” was a transformative experience. 

In lieu of credentialed shooting or sneaking in a DSLR (which, judging by the several I saw in the crowd, would’ve been pretty easy), I packed two of my favorite 35mm point-and-shoots: the Olympus XA and mju-II Zoom. I’d wager that the XA and its faster lens fared much better in terms of accurate exposure, but I was glad I brought the Zoom as well. Two rolls of film with a fixed 35mm from the same vantage point would’ve lacked variety. Timing the light to get a normal exposure with the Zoom was tricky: like most cameras of this variety, it stops down more the further you zoom in and lowers the shutter speed to compensate. I ended up quite liking some of the resulting long-exposures though; they have a sort of ghostly quality to them that suits the band. Plus, there’s something appealing to me about the art of facing off with the camera’s tiny robot brain to create an image that’s partly my doing and partly left to chance.

Much as I like some of these though, I do hope I’m not shooting from the crowd the next time I see Radiohead. They’ve been my favorite band since the 8th grade, and have topped my must-shoot list since I got into photography. Here’s hoping for some 2017 North American dates.