Show us some concert photos.
Submitted by Abigail Road.
How many do you want? I love taking concert pictures. More or less started back in 97 during U2 gigs, with a not so great point and click camera, which had a decent zoom for that kind of time. I upgraded to a Canon EOS300 (the analogue kind) a couple of years after, and but the cost of film bled me dry. July 2005 I splurged out and went digital with an EOS350. Cost me a small fortune, but it's paid back for itself a thousand fold taking the cost of film into account. I'd like to get a more robust/professional body and a couple of lenses, but I'd probably need to invest a couple of grand to get where I really want. A good photo course wouldn't go amiss either. Despite all that, I do get the occassional "lucky shot" though. I really should do something interesting with all these, but for some reason, that never really happened.
David Bowie at the Point Depot in Dublin,
2003. One of those "lucky shots" you can only ever dream of. This is
one of my favourite pictures ever from the analogue time. I've been told David liked it too :)
This shot of Bono I took about 10 days after buying my the 350. It was one of the favourite pictures all tour picked by atu2.com readers during a competition.
Bono is another poser, who seems to be very aware of cameras in the audience. He'll bend over, pose and hold still and even play with the photographers. U2 concerts are, unfortunately, near impossible to smuggle half decent cameras in to. I lost a 50mm/1.8 lens during the concert before this one, when I dropped it.
Gavin Friday at Liberty Hall in August 2006. Another lucky shot, where the lighting turned out to be just right. No one seemed to particularly care about the camera, or me sitting on the floor taking shots. Perfect!
Incidentally, that late July/early August weekend in Dublin was one of my highlights of 2006. So there.
Nick Cave at the World Forum Theatre in The Hague, September 2006. I've taken loads of pictures of Nick before, but none ever lived up to my standard set at the Liss Ard festival in 1999. He moves so much and erratically on stage, it's hard to get any shot in focus. He's one of few performers I find impossible to do justice in pictures. And that's not just because of the funny moustache.
Nick sometimes glares evilly at me and I get scared.
Rufus is another willing subject. While he doesn't necessarily pose for any camera he spots, he just has that natural way of moving and expressions that makes him a very easy subject to take pictures off. Aside from that he loves to spice up his shows with a dash of drama, like this crucification scene. I hear when Madonna did something similar, there were protests going on outside the Amsterdam ArenA.
The Dirty Three are probably my favourite band, ever. This is another picture from the analogue era and then scanned in. I took this at a tiny venue in Paris of which I can't remember the name somewhere in 2004 (I think), but I know there's a great bootleg of it doing the rounds. I really like the colours in this pic.
Another Warren Ellis picture I absolutely love was also taken at the Liss Ard Festival in 1999. First person to ever offer to put me on the guestlist... then promptly forgot and subsequently made me feel very embarrassed by trying to convince the venue people to give me my money back.
This picture of Anouk (Dutch singer) I took at Rock Werchter this year and promptly got hassled by the press lady person right after taking it. Apparently if you've got a 350 with a 100 buck 50mm lens you get tagged "professional". These people are going to have a hard time in the years to come.
After that, I was unable to take pictures of Muse and The Who which, frankly, sucked. Muse, however, did not suck.
One of the coolest pictures of Jarvis ever. I took this at the aforementioned Liss Ard Festival back in 1999 with a very questionable camera. Apparently the organisation had asked Jarvis to, aside from the regular Pulp set, also do an acoustic session at the side of the lake. Jarvis doesn't like acoustic though, or so I was told. So instead, he brought his records and did a DJ set. Very surreal setting. Bright light, lake, lounging back in the grass...
...a terrible shame I was too sick with fever to fully enjoy it.
Other things I remember are the smell of dung, which isn't exactly what you'd expect from a festival called Beach Rock, but may be explained by the fact that the festival actually took place on the Oostende racetrack.
Bowie and Primal Scream rocked, even when Bobbie Gillespie had to hold on to his mic stand for dear life to even stay upright.
Then the most disappointing concert of 2006. Bauhaus. I'd anticipated it so much, looking forward to it, and being very excited about it. I got prime picture shooting location, right in the middle and slightly off the side, so as not to have the mic stand right in front of me.
Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash were having a major tiff on stage, however. The first thing Peter did when he got on stage was sit down on one of the speakers at the far end corner of the stage, giving Daniel Ash the center light he apparently craves. The lot of them ended up playing only half a show in between major sulks.
The day after they played a perfect show at the Mera Luna Festival without any craziness whatsoever. Unfortunately, I wasn't there.
And last but not least, two pictures I took in Dublin last saturday. One is Mark E. Smith of The Fall, who played The Village and put up an amazing show with old people dancing, bouncing and pogoing about. Someone I was talking to beforehand called The Fall the mother of all indie music, which I could kind of find myself in.
You wouldn't give it to him, looking at him, would you?
The second is a band called The Automatic ("Is it a monster?"), who I didn't especially needed to see, but I got a little bored all by myself in Dublin so I went anyway and ended up being the old people pogoing about.
I actually enjoyed it. They've got a bit of a punky thing going on on stage, which I really like and makes for some awesome shots.
Special thumbs up to their support band Mumm-Ra who were pretty awesome too. Very energetic and overexcited like a pack of young dogs.
There's more on my flickr page.