Experiments in Lifelogging, Part 5: Low-light conditions

Lifelogging is all about capturing those important and exciting moments in your life. Going to a concert certainly qualifies as such a moment. So I was very curious how good the Narrative Clip would work in such a situation. Incidentally, I had two concerts coming up within a few days and they were very different.

Concerts

To make it short: Photos from the first concert were a disappointment. This wasn't so much the camera's fault, though. The concert was in a seated venue and while I had a perfectly good view of the stage, the Narrative Clip didn't. I had clipped it as far up on my shirt as possible, but it still only captured the back of the head of the person in front of me for the entire concert. What's more, since I was seated pretty much in the middle, the other person's head blocked the camera's view of the band's singer (who stayed in the middle of the stage for most of the show). It did capture a bit of the action to the left and right, but those photos are hardly worthy of keeping or helping you remember the concert.

The other concert didn't have seats and I ended up standing in front, near the stage. So that worked much better. I wore a t-shirt to this concert and was a bit concerned that the camera, clipped to the collar, would point up and mostly take photos of the ceiling. But that slight upward angle turned out to be a good thing, since the musicians were up on the stage and therefore, obviously, somewhat above the audience.

My other concern was that of movement. At the seated concert, I hardly moved or changed my position all evening. I'm not much of a dancer, but the music at the second concert was such that you simply couldn't stand still. So would the camera produce a lot of photos with motion blur?

I'm actually quite pleased with the results. It's not like the Narrative Clip captured the evening perfectly (which I didn't expect it to) and I still got a couple of photos of the back of other people's heads, but overall it produced quite a few nice shots that will help me remember this concert (which was very good, btw).

Restaurants

It's usually dark at a concert, but the artist will have some light on them. That's not the case in a dimly lit restaurant and, as it turns out, the camera of the Narrative Clip just isn't very good in these situations.

I wore the Narrative Clip on three occasions where I met with people in different restaurants. In all three cases, the lighting was rather low; perfectly fine for the human eye, but quite a bit of a problem for the Clip's camera. See for yourself:

The photos make it look much darker than it was (or at least seemed to be). You can hardly recognise anything, let alone people.

So, to summarise: Low-light conditions can be a problem, unless there's some spotlight on the object of interest (such as an artist at a concert). Plus, not for the first time, I found that the spot where you clip the camera on to can make all the difference.