The biggest weekend

TRNSMT is arguably the biggest weekend of the year for music in Scotland, and yet this was my first time shooting the festival. I was very excited to be shooting it, especially for bands like Fontaines D.C., Confidence Man, VLURE, and Wet Leg.

Ordinarily I’ll be shooting individual gigs, photographing one artist, on one stage, over the space of maybe an hour. So while my subject was essentially the same this weekend, it was a very different workflow, with a lot more performances to shoot and - of course - a lot more film.

Wet-Leg shot by Elliot Hetherton at TRNSMNT festival on ILFORD XP2S black and white film

Wet-Leg

Necessary limitations

Shooting entirely on 35mm has definitely shaped my whole approach to live-music photography. More than anything, it dictates the number of shots I can realistically take at any gig. Whereas most photographers working on digital would take hundreds or even thousands of shots at a show, I enjoy the limitation that film necessitates. Unless I’ve been hired by an artist, or am personally a big fan of the act I’m shooting, I generally limit myself to one roll per show, so just 36 images.

At TRNSMT however, where I was shooting dozens of artists in just a few days, it wasn’t really practical (or affordable) to maintain a roll per artist. For some slots I was shooting as little as 6 shots, while for others I was using up to two complete rolls in the same timeframe. As in all my work, this meant having to be very decisive about the photos I did (and crucially, didn’t) take, knowing what I’m looking for and trying to see the shot line up before it happens.

Purpose built

For a few years now I’ve shot everything on a Nikon F5, which seems almost purpose built for shooting live-music. Manufactured from 1996 to 2004, it’s a sort of best-of-both-worlds kind of camera, taking the best digital technology of the time to make both metering and autofocus remarkably quick and accurate, while retaining all the character and charm of 35mm film.

For this weekend, I shot with a few different lenses, ranging in focal length from 50mm right up to 400mm. My first real steps into analogue photography were portraits, and that’s very much still the way I see things, so longer lenses are ideal for getting the tight, full frames that I like.

Film

All of my work, whether it’s live, portrait, or press, is shot exclusively on ILFORD XP2S.

I’ve always enjoyed shooting black and white film, but the faster and cheaper turnaround with C41 processing compared to other black and white film stocks made it an ideal option as I began to shoot more and more gigs. I was so pleased with the results of those first few rolls I shot that now, three years later, I’ve shot more than 400 rolls of it.

Over the course of the three days I was shooting at TRNSMT I went through about twenty rolls of XP2, sometimes switching mid-song or while running from one stage to another between sets - all part of the fun of festival photography.

Processing

I couldn’t write a feature on my work without mentioning GulabiPhotoLab, they develop and scan every roll I shoot.

Their fast, affordable, and high-quality processing is ultimately what makes shooting live-music on 35mm practical for me. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be shooting film at the scale that I do.