Rambles
By P.G. Ramblings
No Cameras Allowed!

Hardly the most pleasant of experiences... turning up at a concert with your much prized all singing, all dancing digital SLR and having something that resembles a gorilla but with less brains, confiscate it. Of course you do have the option of ripping up your expensive ticket and foregoing the opportunity of seeing your favourite act. On the other hand had you been a Dolly Parton fan and got yourself evicted from one of the recent Odyssey Arena concerts in Belfast... Phew! What a lucky escape you had.

Just for the record, smuggling cameras into concerts isn't a practice anybody's condoning... far from it, and neither am I suggesting anyone should ever consider doing such a thing. It is however a crime I've personally committed in the past and if necessary, might be tempted to do so again. Of course there have been many occasions when permission to legally take photographs at various venues has been sought and granted but on the odd occasion that such requests have been denied... it's Plan B

What type of camera does one require to smuggle into a concert? Certainly not the mobile phone variety, though these days if Plans A and B both fail, a small digital compact with a reasonable zoom can act as an acceptable backup. The preferred toy for such clandestine operations is the trusty, if vintage, Pentax ME Super, one standard lens and one short zoom. Why? It's so damn small it can easily be concealed by taping it to your ankle when dismantled and God forbid, should it be discovered, who cares, they're dirt cheap and readily available on the likes of ebay. Actually, on second thoughts, perhaps not ebay. Chances are you could be ripped off and with ebay's track record of buyer or indeed seller protection, rather than wave goodbye to your hard earned cash, support your local independent camera store instead. That's if you can find one that hasn't been swallowed whole by Jessops and regurgitated as another of their emporiums of nothingness.

On the technical side and especially for the digital geeks in our midst, the ME Super is an aperture priority automatic 35mm manual focus SLR that utilises the Pentax K-Bayonet mount system. It features centre-weighted through-the-lens light metering with +/- 2EV exposure compensation and is powered by a couple of 1.5v Alkaline (LR44) or Silver-oxide (G13) batteries. Also in the unlikely event that the batteries should fail and you haven't access to a set of jump leads, it will still operate at mechanical shutter speed setting of 125. Couple it with any of SMC Pentax-M series of compact lenses and you've got yourself a very reliable and efficient compact camera which incidentally weighs in at 445 grams or for the non metric types: 15.7 oz

Oh! Don't forget the film. Happy snapping and endeavour not to get evicted or worse still... arrested.

(The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of PhotoGenre but on the other hand... in some cases they are... but not if they're illegal)

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