This Is Not A Photo Opportunity

That Was The Year That Was 2009

This time last year I blogged that 2008 had been a hectic photographic year, little knowing that 2009 would be even more extreme, and end up looking as follows:

1. Stars
2. Black Keys
3. All Tomorrow’s Parties – Mt Buller
4. All Tomorrow’s Parties – Brisbane Powerhouse: Fuck Buttons, Dead Meadow & Afrirampo
5. Bon Iver
6. Laughing Clowns
7. Jeff Beck
8. Gareth Liddiard
9. Gary Numan
10. Summer Tones
11. The Stranglers
12. Andrew Morris
13. Duke Spirit
14. The Kills
15. Evan Dando
16. Easy Star All-Stars
17. Giants of Science
18. School of Seven Bells
19. UnderExposed – 25 April
20. The Drones
21. UnderExposed – 1 May
22. UnderExposed – 2 May
23. 4ZZZ Rumble Rock
24. Screamfeeder
25. Violent Soho
26. Brisbane Sounds
27. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead
28. Red Riders
29. DZ
30. The Middle East
31. Ladytron
32. Flipper
33. Deerhunter
34. Wolf & Cub
35. Washington
36. Incremental Records Launch
37. + 1 Records Launch Night
38. Philadelphia Grand Jury
39. Timothy Carroll
40. Splendour In The Grass
41. Cannot Buy My Soul
42. I Heart Hiroshima
43. X
44. Alice Cooper
45. Monster Magnet
46. Violent Soho
47. Big Sound 2009 – Weds
48. Big Sound 2009 – Thurs
49. Big Sound – Friday
50. Frankly Festival
51. Van Dyke Parks
52. DZ
53. Spiral Stairs
54. Vivian Girls
55. Tiny Vipers
56. Butcher Birds
57. Yves Klein Blue
58. All Tomorrow’s Parties – Nightmare Before Xmas
59. All Tomorrow’s Parties – Inbetween Days
60. All Tomorrow’s Parties – 10 Years of ATP

As last year, I managed to meet my target for the year of 52 gigs (i.e. an average of one a week), although in retrospect I’ve really struggled to keep on top of it this year, as can be seen from all the blogs and photos I’ve yet to sort out. I’ve been out of Brisbane for about 5 months during the year, which meant that I’ve never managed to catch up with the backlog.

Counting up the number of acts I’ve photographed during 2009, the total is a somewhat scary 259, with the end of the year’s ATP adventure resulting in 60 bands being photographed in 10 days (although I didn’t shoot many bands at the 10 Years of ATP weekend as didn’t have a photo pass but security were fine with me taking my camera in and no one seemed bothered by me photographing from the crowd).

In terms of venues, The Zoo has again been my second home during the year, with 17 of the gigs being there, with The Troubadour a distant second with eight gigs.  The plan to try and get some bigger gigs has largely been a FAIL, with only three gigs at The Tivoli (and none since March), two gigs at the  BCC (Jeff Beck and Alice Cooper), one at The Riverstage (Kev Carmody: Cannot Buy My Soul, which was a mixing desk shoot apart from the last song) and NONE at the BEC.  The full breakdown for 2009 is shown in the pie chart below.

On top of the gigs I photographed there’s another 12 gigs I went to as a non-photographing punter, including Big Day Out, ATP in Brisbane, Neil Young, The Who (both at the BEC) and Iron Maiden in Christchurch.

Photographic highlights of the year include:

• All things All Tomorrow’s Parties – From the Mt Buller weekend, which was one of the best music festivals I’ve ever attended to getting to photograph a UK festival at the Nightmare Before Xmas weekend to seeing and photographing Dirty Three on a tiny stage in front of about 100 people;
• Getting to show a load of my photos from the last few years at the UnderExposed exhibition;
• The complete insanity of photographing Flaming Lips at Splendour, wondering if being in a photo pit to photograph a band will ever be as good; and
• Being given artistic direction by Van Dyke Parks when taking his and Robert Schneider’s photograph at the Big Sound conference.

Overall gig of the year was probably All Tomorrow’s Parties at Mt Buller, which being at the end of the first week in January set the bar ridiculously high for the rest of the year.  Other exceptional performances were of Flaming Lips, The Specials and Gutter Twins at Splendour, The Who at the BEC (which I was really disappointed at not getting to photograph), Van Dyke Parks’ exquisite show upstairs at The Powerhouse, seeing My Bloody Valentine three times in three days at ATP Nightmare Before Xmas and Dirty Three three times in a week, including an impromptu, unrehearsed run through of ‘Horse Stories’ in front of about 100 people at ATP Inbetween Days.  Best local show I saw was DZ’s 1am show at The Troubadour at the end of May.

Musical lows of the year were again so many mediocre-at-best bands at Splendour, with the weekend largely saved by Flaming Lips’ unforgettable show and another fairly poor bill at the Big Day Out, although not as bad as the 2010 festival line-up.

Photographic lows? Any gig with rubbish/no lighting, which was probably most of them…as usual.  And missing out on photographing a lot of the big gigs and festivals I really wanted to photograph.

And finally, personal favourite photos from the year include the following images, although there might be a load more in all the photos I’ve still yet to go through:

Back to Brisbane next week, although don’t have any gigs lined up for January yet.  Will hopefully be getting a bit further through catching up on all the photos and blogs from this year in the meantime.

Happy New Year.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 12:05 am. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with 2009, Brisbane, Justin Edwards, music, photography, review, Sony a700. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.