The 1980s
Me and my OM10
I only really started getting into music in my final years at school. That went up another level when I went to University in Manchester where there were gigs on most weekends at the Student Union building. The main music venue in Manchester at that time, the Apollo, was less than a mile away from the University. I had never been to a gig during my time in sleepy North Yorkshire villages but that all changed when I moved to the big city to study.
I "invested" my holiday earnings from the farm where I lived my teenage years on a hi-fi system from Laskys, an electronics store in central Manchester (now long gone, taken over by Comet in 1989). During my last year at University in Manchester I bought my first "proper" camera, an Olympus OM10 SLR with the basic 50mm lens. That cost me just over £100 which was quite a lot to me at the time. It had very positive reviews, and had a manual override which would in due course prove itself very useful when trying to optimise film exposure.
Initially I would take the OM10 to the football at Old Trafford as well as Belle Vue speedway. I also noticed people using SLR cameras at gigs at Manchester Apollo, and decided to give that a go. The Apollo would attract most of the major bands who were touring the UK, even though it's capacity was only 2,693 in an all seated theatre.
I did venture a little further afield to see AC/DC at the Deeside Leisure Centre, but most of my gigs were at either the Student Union or the Apollo. I saw the likes of Wings and the Who at the Apollo, although getting decent seats for acts like these would involve queuing up outside the Apollo overnight.
The first time I took my new camera along to the Apollo was for Slade in 1982. Thereafter I would take it to "selected" acts, as it started becoming a bit clearer that cameras were frowned upon by certain venues and/or acts. Equally films were not cheap and developing them was also expensive for someone living on a student grant. During the next 6 and a half years I would capture some very special moments, but just how special only became clearer when I started looking back at some of these photos during the second decade of the 21st century.
With the onset of AI I have been able to revisit some of these photos. In particular I have been able to reduce blur in some of the images. AI has not enhanced everything. In particular when trying to improve some photos of people at a distance it could result in images that are really not representative of facial features of people who might otherwise be readily identifiable. For example the photo of the Royal Box at Wembley during Live Aid turned a beautiful princess into an ugly step-sister. In a similar vein, Brian May seemed to change gender! Another example of Mr. McCartney getting a facelift on the big screen at Live Aid is included below.
I have left such photos as they were, along with quite a number where I was close enough to get well defined photos with the negatives I had. I have only applied AI enhancements to photos I took in the 1980s, and not to any where I have taken in recent years using digital cameras.
