Last night I had the opportunity to do a bit of band photography. Rude Awakening asked me to give them some new images with a bit of atmosphere in them for their website. They also have a Rude Awakening facebook page by the way.
The band played at a really great venue called The Perfect 5th in Taunton. A compact but funky place with bags of atmosphere. Well worth a visit.
UPDATE:
So it’s now 10 years later and I am looking back on this shoot and I can see how I was really pushing my camera to the limit at the time. I was using a 5D mark 1 and I seem to remember the focusing system was, well….s***! So it was pretty tricky to get shots in low light and nail focus. In some photos though it didn’t matter too much as the lighting and atmospheric feel of the night meant that a picture being razor sharp in focus wasn’t what was going to make or break a photo.
The colourful lighting also hid a little that the camera’s handling of incandescent light was pretty darn awful compared to today’s modern DSLR cameras.
As it turns out they still seem to be going some 10 years on, maybe I should ask if they need any new band photography images! Here are some other music photos I have done since….with a better camera!
Here’s a group shot of the band. I would have really liked to take time out especially for a good band shot but time was tight so this was taken very quickly whilst the previous band was still packing up.
The lighting set up for such a compact venue was amazing, this really added to the photos. Here’s Leon.
Rachel
Paul
The stage
Pete
Kerry
Ian
Here’s a video of Rude Awakening I found 10 years after the photo shoot, of them playing a cover of Crazy by Seal. Great stuff.
