Another last minute request to cover a show, this time the second night of the 4ZZZ Tater Stomp at The Troubadour.

Like most photographers I am a very wary Troubadour photographer and it comes bottom of the list for requesting shows to cover unless it’s someone that I really, really want to see. Whilst it’s a fantastic venue and post-gig drinking hole, the lighting, even at its very best, is usually really terrible. Sometimes you hit lucky, like I did the last time I photographed here and Bill Callahan was stood in exactly the right place to have some good quality light shining on him, sometimes you don’t, with photographing the Nation Blue last year springing to mind, where ISO 1600, f1.7, and 1/25 was still giving me chronic underexposure and a set of unusable photos.

I photographed the last two acts on Saturday night; Dick Desert And The Shotgun Country Club and Texas Kate. The lighting was average/typical Troubadour fare; my settings were around ISO800, f2.8, 1/50.

The only previous time that I’d seen Dick Desert was a solo show at a Trash Video fundraiser at The Rev all the way back in December 2005. It’s strange that it’s been so long as he’s previously personally requested that Rave send me to photograph when they’ve been covering him; from memory I think once I was away and another time the gig was cancelled last minute.

Was great to see him play again, and Saturday’s show with the Shotgun Country Club was a really fun show of the punk country that Brisbane does so well.

It was also great to see Texas Kate and catch up with her about the recent Texas Tea European tour. Really looking forward to their new album which is out in November; I did some photos for Mess & Noise when they were recording it last November and it’s just been far too long for something so good to remain under wraps.

Some more photos on Flickr.

It was a night that had it all: drinks, drugs, fighting, guys mopping up their own blood, girls mopping up their own blood, police cars and ambulances outside at the end of the night… And somewhere in the midst of all that Cut Copy played a gig to a sell out Tivoli crowd.

The night started early with NZ band Shocking Pinks playing to a tiny and mostly disinterested crowd. The room was more than empty enough for ironic, theatrical dancing from a small group to their very 1990 shoegazing sound. The band also played in near darkness, with only a couple of spot lights at the back of the stage.

It’s annoying when you turn up early to check out support bands and you end up with the feeling that they’re not being given much of chance to impress. Whilst people are generally playing for the headline act and, as a result, they are rightly given more time to soundcheck and generally have better sound and a more impressive light show, you sometimes get the feeling that there is almost an element of sabotage to ensure that there is no way that the support acts could ever upstage the headliners.

Whilst the ever increasing price of drinking at gigs is probably taking away from people wanting to get to venues early (for example, the obscene $11 that The Tivoli is now charging for a bottle of Smirnoff Black), I always try to get there to check out the support bands – you never when you might discover something really good or where they might end up a few years down the line. Down the years, support bands I’ve seen have included Radiohead (twice), Tool, Soundgarden, Faith No More, You Am I, Travis, Wolfmother, Primus, and Mercury Rev to name a few.

“The” Juan Maclean were the main support band. For a band playing “happy house” dance music with Theremin and cowbell they were distinctly motionless and seemingly uninterested in trying to engage with the audience. They also played in near darkness, with my photos being so rubbish that there’s nothing I’d really want to put up for public viewing.

I saw Cut Copy at the V Festival earlier in the year, albeit from a distance, and thought they sounded like New Order. Seeing them close up they still sound like New Order. Their latest album, In Ghost Colours, has been garnering rave reviews from the likes of DiS and Pitchfork, although having heard a number of songs I can’t work out why; it’s OK and fairly harmless stuff but just not THAT good.

Live, they put on a really good show. The sound and lights were great (although I ended up disappointed with the shots I got of them overall; lots of back light, not enough from the front) and they really connected with the audience. As such, it was strange that the night ended up with all the aggro and bloodshed.

Some more photos on Flickr.

Got one of my Biffy Clyro photos in the latest edition of Blunt magazine, the one with The Living End and Foxboro Hot Tubs on the front cover (#71). It’s always good getting a telephone call requesting a photo from a publication that you’ve not been published in before. So yay for me.

May was a bit of a lean month for photographing gigs, not helped by Cosmic Psychos cancelling their tour and Rave not being able to get a reviewer for Don Letts, both of which I was down to cover.

And things haven’t improved much in June, with Barry Adamson, who I was really looking forward to seeing, cancelling his show at The Zoo due to “unavoidable promotional commitments”, my emailed requests for the first week of the month – The Thrills at The Zoo and I Killed The Prom Queen - being missed when the gigs were assigned, and no one wanting to review Angus and Julia Stone. However, no one requested to photograph Powderfinger at The Tivoli and so having been offered it and having never seen Powderfinger before thought “what the hell, why not?”

So, I get to The Tivoli and find out that I’m only down to photograph support act Whitley… So I photograph Whitley for my allotted three songs (one of which lasts about a minute) and he plays solo, sat on a stool, singing with his eyes shut…

The lovely Tivoli desk staff try to find someone to ok it for me to photograph Powderfinger, and about 2 minutes before they come up I get a call from the PR to say that as long as I signed the contract then I’m good to photograph. So yay for that.

The downside of photographing tonight is that they’re filming it for live broadcast to Big Pond mobile phones, with the full gig also being available for download the following day (for the bargain price of $2.95 I believe….). As such, the photo pit and the stairs are off limits to allow camera men to move around and so we get to photograph from a tiny bit of space at the bottom of the stairs, right against the stage. Although it’s a very side-on view, and means that there’s not the variety in angles that you would normally get from photographing from a photo pit, the worst thing is that the view of singer Bernard Fanning is largely blocked by guitarist Darren Middleton’s mic stand… The gig has been split up into an “acoustic” and an “electric” section (note to Powderfinger: acoustic generally doesn’t mean electric bass and electric guitars…), with an interlude in the middle. Our three songs to photograph in were from the “acoustic” part of the set, meaning three songs of “stool rock” (amazingly there isn’t a wikipedia entry for Stool Rock…).

Much is made of Powderfinger in Australia; arguably they’ve been one of its biggest bands for much of the last 10 years. Being fairly new here, I’m not quite sure why. They’ve got that earnest, down to earth thing going on, they’re pretty competent musicians and seem like nice guys, but in trying to compare them to something from the UK I keep coming back to Del Amitri… or a less edgy Travis… whatever that is…

The recent Drowned In Sound review for Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida Or Death and All His Friends’ makes the comment that “…Coldplay remain resolutely no-brow, a rock band version of Jack Vettriano; art for people who don’t like art; crowd-pleasers for people who don’t like crowds; music for people who don’t like music”.

If that’s the case I’m not sure where it leaves bands like Powderfinger….

And on a related note, you can enjoy DiS’s review of Bernard Fanning’s ‘Wish You Well’, the Number 1 song in last year’s Triple J’s Hottest 100 (as voted by the Australian people as their favourite song of the year…), here.

Some more photos on flickr.

Last Friday I had a very last minute request to photograph Story Of The Year supported by The Audition at The Tivoli.  Whilst not being overly familiar with the band I know from having seen photos that they love their jumping.  Having had such a good time at Soundwave photographing jumping bands I couldn’t turn it down and was looking forward to the gig. So it was a real disappointment when both bands (I missed the first band who started at 7:15pm only 15 minutes after the doors opened…) played in very poor lighting, akin to somewhere between a night of poor lighting at The Zoo and a typical night’s lighting at The Troubadour.  So in the end I didn’t really end up with anything good, let alone any good jump shots.

It wasn’t just the low shutter speeds I was having to use, it was also the fact that so much of what was happening was happening inches away from my face and I couldn’t fit it all into frame.  Using my widest lens at 28mm with a 1.5x multiplier is 42mm in the real world, nowhere near wide enough, so I also ended up with loads of shots where I missed complete body parts…

After last week’s pleasant surprise of good lighting at The Zoo, when my camera coped well with the conditions, after this experience I can’t wait to get a full frame camera and hopefully one that’ll be able to manage over ISO 800 without looking like sludge…

Tax return time is almost upon us; hopefully they’ll be some additional funds this year to help finance some new toys…

There was no three song rule, although after probably 6 or so songs they did chuck us out of the photo pit.  It was occasionally hard work, as the pit was quite narrow and with four of five burly security guards standing in front of the stage made it a bit of a tight squeeze and also sometimes made it difficult to get the angle you wanted without getting a security guard in frame.  Additionally, with it being a narrow pit, crowd surfers coming over the barrier tended to mean that in the mêlée you ended up pinned against the stage.

Musically the bands were pretty forgettable. It’s not even that old age is kicking in and all these bands sound the same but more like they just sound like some weak, unadventurous 1980s bog standard rock band; so much for the angry youth of today…  Somewhat strangely there were ongoing chants of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie’ throughout the night; you’d think that teenage emo kids and Australian nationalistic tendencies would be mutually exclusive but it’s obviously not the case.  You wouldn’t have put them down for secret Daily Mail reading types…

More photos on flickr.

The Audition

 

Story Of The Year

- His computer’s off.
- Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What’s wrong?
- Nothing. I’m all right

I recently made the point on the flickr concert photography forum that photographing concerts isn’t rocket science – most of what’s happening on stage – the lighting, where people stand, what they do - is completely out of your control and as long as you’ve got a basic understanding of how a camera works you’ll be fine.

However, according to the responses I’m wrong and it IS rocket science.

One of the replies made the point about how far off base I was in saying what I said and that I wouldn’t have said what I said if I was using manual settings and shooting Rancid on film. I’m not quite sure what their exact point was; although I’ve never seen Rancid I’m guessing it was about photographing an energetic punk band running all over the stage and getting well composed shots. Unless I’m missing something the fundamentals of photographing haven’t changed with the introduction of digital cameras and it still relies on the relationships between film speed, shutter speed and aperture. So there’s no real difference between photographing with manual settings on film or on digital other than the fact that you can’t instantly review the photos you’ve taken when using film.

So I’d thought I’d test myself out.

I decided that at my next gig I would set my camera to manual, turn off the playback on my LCD, stop myself from chimping and take a maximum of 72 shots (equivalent to 2 x 36 exposure films). I cheated somewhat as Rancid weren’t playing this weekend… but The Audreys were…

I had planned on using the 72 shots to take some of support act J. Walker from Machine Translations but as I got there late and he had already started playing and as everyone at the front was sat on the floor I decided not to. I probably should have reduced my quota down to 50 or 60 for The Audreys. In the end I found it quite hard to actually get through 72 shots of one band, even though I didn’t limit myself to only photographing the first three songs, but then managed to go over my quota in the encore… (For the encore the band played acoustically using a single microphone at the front of the stage to pick up all the sound. I would have probably taken more photos but was conscious of the sound of my shutter and the fact that the room needed to be very quiet for how the band was playing).

I normally don’t take that many photos when I shoot a gig; if it’s a three song rule then it’ll usually be 50 or so shots for a headline band, and probably don’t do a lot more than that on any single band when there are no restrictions in place. I can never fathom the photographers who’ll take 500 shots in a night of three bands; they can’t be thinking much about their shots and if they’re spending that much time with a camera in front of their faces they can’t be enjoying the gig. I think I did last year’s V Festival on about 500 shots…

And so to the results.

The original plan was to not look at the photos until I got back home and had downloaded them onto my computer, but I couldn’t resist having a peek when I was packing up my gear at the end of the night.

I was pretty happy with what I had come out with; well over half were ‘keepers’ and there are a maybe half a dozen or so that I really like. In the end I uploaded 30 photos to flickr.

I was blessed by a rare night of good lighting at The Zoo which helped a lot and meant that at ISO 800 and f2.8, I was mostly using shutter speeds of 1/80 or 1/100, although still having to go down to 1/30 when photographing towards the back of the stage.

Not reviewing what I had taken meant I had the usual closed eyes/half closed eyes photos that I normally would have deleted as I went. In addition to be reviewing the quality of photos, I think the other advantage in being able to look through your photos with digital is that you can keep a tab on how many photos you’ve got of each member of the band. Although I felt that I was focusing predominantly on Taasha I didn’t actually end up taking as many photos as I thought I had of her. I think I was holding back in anticipation of the perfect picture which would do her beauty justice. She really is stunningly beautiful, even before she starts singing.

However, I think the most annoying thing from the night was that sometimes my composition seemed to be slightly off. For example, in one song Taasha was doing some clapping and I managed to take four close up shots with great facial expressions but managed to miss the end of her fingers in each shot…

The band was completely awesome and you should check them out.

And Kate Miller-Heidke fans should note that this is how you sing beautifully, with true emotion and without the show-pony histrionics…

The best of the ‘keepers’ are on flickr.

Although my initial investigations into time-lapse photography were done on film back in 2004, my interest has still been there in recent years, and even more so since I got my first digital camera in late 2006.

Although I have been looking to do something that involves a series of continuous and rapid shots, I found that you can buy intervalometers fairly cheaply on eBay and so bought one a few weeks ago. The intervalometer can be used to set the time until the first photo is taken, the interval between photos and the total number of photos taken. As such, it is suited to more traditional time-lapse photography where the camera is set up and left to take a series of photos over a length of time.

The first time-lapse video that I made with my camera was the view from our lounge window, looking across the river towards the ferry stop at Bulimba. I set the intervalmoter to take a photo every 10 seconds and to take 399 photos. This is the maximum specified number of photos that can be taken with it, although it can be set to run until the memory card is full. Using a the rate of 1 photo every 10 seconds meant that it photographed the view of the river for just over an hour.

Having taken the photos I used the free version of Animator DV+ to animate the 399 still photos. I set the photos to play back at a rate of 15 frames per second, giving about 26 seconds of footage.

The video looked like this:

I took another series of photos out of the front room window, looking upstream this time, although somehow I managed to mess it up and manage to include part of the window frame in the shot…

After having done the 26 second movie looking upstream, using the intervalometer set to 399 shots, I repeated the downstream time-lapse with the intervalometer set to run until the memory card was full. I used the same setting as before, with a photo being taken every 10 seconds. In addition to creating a longer movie I also wanted to assess the camera settings as the sky got darker. I used a film speed of 200 ISO, an aperture of f8 and a shutter speed of 1/160. At the time I started this time-lapse this was slightly over-exposing each shot; I hoped by doing this that I would get more shots as it became darker.

At about 30 seconds into the time-lapse movie it suddenly gets dark. This was as a result of a storm moving in. The photos get darker and darker until the light outside became too dark that the camera couldn’t focus (I had set it on auto focus as opposed to manual focus).

The storm started very soon after this. I set the camera up to try to record this, however in my haste I didn’t change the ISO speed, with it left at the 200 ISO I had been using earlier. Although I changed the camera from manual to aperture mode, so that the shutter speed could change as the light deteriorated to give a correct exposure, this meant that almost from when I started taking the photos the shutter speed started to increase up to 10 seconds. For reasons unknown the camera also froze soon into the movie, although this was rectified by turning it off and back on again. I didn’t get very far into taking shots when the rain became so bad that the wind was blowing it back into our front room and all over my camera.

A blink and you miss it 3 seconds of storm… (the last frame is after I’d shut the window…)

Looking forward to the wet season; hopefully they’ll be some interesting storms to capture.

[DISCLAIMER: My girlfriend wanted to see Kate Miller-Heidke so asked me to request to do the photos at this gig…..]

Much loved by Sunrise, much loathed by a large majority of the Pig City audience, Kate Miller-Heidke was back in Brisbane for a couple of dates at The Zoo and an All Ages show at the Judith Wright Centre.

Her Pig City performance of three Go-Betweens songs - Streets of Your Town, Clouds, and Cattle and Cane - accompanied by the Brisbane Excelsior Band fell down on many levels: she was placed on the bill between Regurgitator and The Saints, which made her stick out like a sore thumb and being a very mainstream, newly signed major label act with a new record to plug she just didn’t fit in with the spirit of what the day was about.

Whilst the idea for using brass arrangements and the arrangements themselves were really awesome, they were somewhat spoilt by her cutesy-wutesy, very girly voice. Plus when she goes into opera-mode her body language completely changes, she stiffens up and her eyes roll back in her head… so I ended up with a load of photos where you can mainly see white where her pupils would normally be…

Seeing her ARIA award performance on TV did little to change my mind, being cringingly embarrassing on a night when most of the live performances were poor, with Operator Please probably putting in the best performance.

Having sold out The Tivoli last year I was expecting the place to be rammed, even though she was doing two nights and an all ages show, but, whilst a healthy turnout, it wasn’t. The crowd was probably about 85% female, which was interesting.

Technically you can’t really fault her voice and she is very charming in her between song banter. But listening to a whole set you can’t actually work out what her true voice and there is a lack of true emotion, which together with all the show pony vocal histrionics makes her come across like the Yngwie Malmsteen of female singer-songwriters.

A couple of the songs sounded good, there was one that she introduced as new that had some whole band harmonies going on that stood out, but a lot had really banal Play School-type melodies and lyrics, culminating in a really cringingly awful song about Australian Idol that wouldn’t have been out of place in a set by Victoria Wood. And then there was the “ironic” (at least I’m guessing it was ironic) cover of ‘You’re The Voice‘, which was one of the worst songs of the 1980s in the 1980s, let alone looking back at it in 2008.

My girlfriend enjoyed it though. So maybe it’s a girl thing.

More photos on flickr.

The first, and indeed last, time I saw Rocket Science was when I photographed the first Come Together festival at Luna Park in Sydney in April 2005. This was when it was a one day festival of smaller indie/alt Australian bands, before it became a two day metal/emo festival with Australian and International bands (although the 2008 bill, is one day of indie, one day of metal/emo). After that day they seemed to completely disappear.

Although they have had their share of mishaps over the years, not least singer/organist/theremin-ist Roman Tucker’s head injury/induced coma back in 2004, it seems like they’ve being doing the marriage, children, extra-curricular band thing for the last couple years.

Good to see them back and sounding so good. In typical fashion the Zoo lighting was rubbish, although not as bad as the recent My Disco gig. I only stayed for half their set as the May Day holiday on the Monday meant that the Rave deadline was midday on Friday and, as I don’t have access to Photoshop at work, I had to sort out the photos and send them in before I went to bed.

Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side were first band on the night but weren’t at their best. Obviously missing Texas Kate who had flown off to Germany earlier in the day for the start of the Texas Tea European tour. I Heart Hiroshima were the main support and are doing the whole tour with Rocket Science. When I first saw them, back in maybe late 2005/early 2006 I thought they were a fantastic band and tipped them for great things on certain Australian music websites. Don’t know why but they’ve never been the same since Mel left. Seem to be doing ok for themselves though, with lots of high profile tour supports and festivals.

Some more photos on flickr.

Rocket Science

I Heart Hiroshima