Caribou + Four Tet @ The Zoo, 15.02.2011

In the cold light of the morning after the night before, I’m annoyed with myself for taking home a such a bad set of photos from the Caribou/Four Tet double-header.

Firstly, there’s Four Tet. There’s only one thing worse than taking photos of keyboard players and that’s taking photos of laptop musicians. At the very end of the laptop musician photographic experience there’s when said laptops are being balanced on a plank of wood being supported by two oil drums. Sometimes you get lucky and can use the light from their laptop as the key light when they’re studying something on the screen close-up, (see Girl Talk) but Keiren Hebden doesn’t even offer this up tonight, spending an hour vigorously nodding his head in the darkness of The Zoo stage and making for some really rubbish photos.

Even before Caribou start, there has to be a change of plan as I realise that unless I want to take a lot of photos of Dan Snaith’s back I need to move from where I’ve positioned myself and go around to the other side of the side (we don’t get fancy photo pits like they do in Sydney and Melbourne). Luckily it’s still some time before they’re due to start so I managed to squeeze myself in at the very edge of the stage. I’m still going to have to negotiate a lot of mic stands to get photos but at least I can see his face and hopefully the drummers isn’t going to block the view too much.

It’s a sell out gig, and the Zoo is packed and I don’t want to spend the whole gig at the front taking photos so decide I’m going to do three or four songs and then get out of the front. But having made that decision I find that I’m rushing and that the lighting, a mixture of low red lighting with an occasional blinding flash of strobe isn’t helping. Every time I change the settings for the darkness, the strobe is turned on and vice versa. Every time I decide to go with one setting and wait until the lighting is right coincides with the other type of lighting, whichever settings I have ready to use. The longer this goes on the more conscious I am of songs slipping by, of not having taken any good photos and knowing that my self-imposed time limit is slipping away. I think I end up doing four, maybe five songs.  I stay longer than I planned due to the band having technical problems and needing to change a laptop, with what sounds like a quick revision of the setlist to include a couple of short songs that don’t require drums, before calling it quits and heading back further into the room.  Later on in the night I also try to get some long shots from the other side of the room, but there’s too many tall people in front of me to salvage anything worthwhile.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.