I’m always keen to try new things in photography, it gets my creative juices flowing, helps me learn things about lighting and composition, and often gives me ideas I can use in my day to day shoots. Gig photography’s always something I’ve been interested in but rarely done, so when my brother’s band The Blue Kings were playing in London, at Round Midnight in Angel, it was a great chance for me to take some shots of something different. They’re a fabulous Blues band, with 27 years of experience behind them, go and see them if you get the chance.
The main difference in shooting a band is that no-one’s posing for me at any point as they do in boudoir and glamour shoots. Instead of carefully crafting a photo and controlling lighting and posing, I have to capture fast-moving musicians. There are a lot of great moments in a show, especially if you capture a nice moment between band members, but you never know when those are going to happen, so it’s very much a  case of being prepared and reacting really quickly to what’s going on. It means I interact with events in a very different way if I’m photographing them. On the one hand I’m generally closer to the action, and having the photos helps me preserve the memories longer, but in some ways I’m more detached from the event as I’m so focussed on getting photos of it. Somehow I manage to simultaneously feel more a part of things and less involved at the same time. Weird I know.
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