Welcome to the Unholy Racket Music Pics blog! I hope to use this blog to tell the tale behind the pictures on the site. There is always so much more going on at a gig then just the main event on stage, so I hope to capture some of the atmosphere here. I will also use the blog to store what was going on in my head before, during and after the gigs as well as my thoughts on music photography.
Hope you enjoy it!
Neil (aka Unholy Racket)
Nowt but a nipper....
Occasionally I go along to a gig where I am not the oldest person in the room. It's not often, but it does happen. Usually I leave a gig thinking how it would be nice to be young again, have all that energy and dance around like a mad thing. Of course if I was that young and spent all my time dancing I wouldn't get to do the whole gig photography thing.
Tonight's F-Club reunion was the total opposite. This was a gig for the generation a little before mine. In fact a fair percentage of the folks who went to the F-Club were music fans and formed bands that I became a huge fan of. I would love to say that I knew everything about that scene and was there, but I wasn't. I only went tonight because Wolfie (nicest bloke in rock and roll) of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry was playing in The Expelaires and had asked me to go along and take some pics.
This was a gig and a crowd born out of the tail end of punk. I was just starting secondary school when this lot were out clubbing and gigging. The line-up tonight was made up of Knife Edge, The Expelaires and Penetration. The crowd was made up of an even greater number of the Yorkshire post-punk music crowd with Red Lorry Yellow Lorry (past and present), Skeletal Family, The Mission and many more represented. This was a real reunion, and one that represented the roots of arguably Leeds' most creative and influential period. I am a bit lucky that I get to chat to a few folks who were around through that period and can fill me in on the missing details. In fact, tonight, I am doubly lucky. The walking musical encyclopedia that is Neil Hunt (boss of Zig Zag Lighting) is here. Not only can he help me out with interesting facts and tales, but he is also lighting the gig which is means I have a fighting chance of getting some nicely lit shots (The Brudenell can be a little hit and miss with lighting)
Knife Edge rattle through a flat out punk set. It is a tasty enough starter and paved the way nicely for what was to follow.
The Expelaires rip through a more post-punk offering. Heavy guitars, literally in the case of the hand crafted steel guitar on stage right create a more industrial punk sound. I was doubling up with both video and stills tonight and doing my best to keep both going. The Expelaires deliver a fine set that goes down well with the home crowd. It is probably the most musically interesting set of the night as it sat neatly in that spot between punk and what was to follow.
I chatted with loads of folks in the build up to the Penetration set. All the conversations had one thing in common. That was resounding praise for Pauline Murray and co. There was to be no disappointment. Penetration delivered a straight punk set that didn't have any of the nods in the direction of popularity for which many bands strive.
The bands were great entertainment and the crowd gave each a warm reception. I suspect that a good many folks came along the relive their youth and catch up with old friends as much as see the music. For me, it was an interesting glimpse into a music scene that shaped the one I loved so much back in my day, now where is the schedule for them Blood Brothers gigs?
The light of day..
I was just thinking today about how little of my stuff ever sees the light of day... Since my last blog I have hardly done anything other then take photos and video or edit pictures for people. As I was ploughing through it all, it did occur to me that lots of the stuff will never ever used for anything. Having said that, it has been a huge opportunity to try new things and learn from mistakes. So I thought that this wee blog could be spent going over what I learned.
I decided to pop along to The Fenton on Friday night. I wanted to see Quasimodo's debut and the Marching Men giving The Sisters back catalogue an outing. There wasn't much to learn at the gig, just a few reminders. Gigs in back/upstairs rooms of pubs are rarely lit well, but this was as dark as any place I can remember. The lead singer's spot in the centre of the stage was the very darkest spot of all. I should really just go along and watch these gigs, rather then trying to take any pics. The lesson from Friday was that a 5D Mk II, as good as it is, cannot deal with pitch black. I thought it might be a good opportunity to turn the ISO dial to maximum (6400) and see if it could cope. The simple answer is no. The image breaks up so badly that it really isn't worth it. The only point in Quasimodo's set that saw Joel, the lead singer, get enough light to take a pic was when the dry ice/smoke machine got turned on. The light, which was a footlight, seemed to bounce around in the cloud and create a sort of ball of light that actually managed last long enough to get a very noisy snap. The Marching Men disappeared entirely at the hands of the smoke machine, and the resultant fog closed Leeds Bradford Airport for several hours. So, pretty much all of the pics I took will never see the light of day, purely because they don't look good enough to put out there. Still, I enjoyed the gig. Quasimodo put in a good shift for their debut gig with a barrage of white falconesque guitar shenanigans. The Marching Men also delivered the most polished performance I have seen them deliver.
Saturday and Sunday were a bit of a blur. Shooting video snippets for The March Violets against a green screen background involving props, people, creatures, multiple cameras and loads of waiting around. There are many hours of footage to be looked at, the vast majority of which will simply get discarded. The whole of last week was spent setting this up and dealing with the variety of problems that cropped up. There were a couple of times when I thought that we would have to call it off, but we managed to get there in the end. The lesson from the weekend for me was that people really can make seemingly impossible things happen, and there is an awful lot of goodwill in the world. Mark Hubbard at Old Chapel Studios was a life saver, Anne Stokes at the Tower of Art was a delight and purveyor of fine props, Oliver pitched in with some cool camera work and the Cornwall massive (Amanda, Warren and Zena) went above and beyond the call of duty to help out. I think the DIY ethic in music is alive and well as long as folks rally around like that. The details of the video are under wraps for the moment, but there were enough challenges to have put paid to most projects, but folk really did make it happen against all odds.
I had arranged a photo shoot for a feature in Counterfeit Magazine for Sunday too. It was a bit too much to tackle on top of the hectic videoing schedule. Anyway, I begged some more time at Old Chapel (thanks again Mark) and thought that reusing the green screen set-up would work. Castrovalva are an interesting proposition. A three piece indie noise rock outfit from Leeds, they were lovely. I liked one of the tracks they had put up on Myspace. It struck me as sounding like a very noisy Frank Zappa (I stuck the link below)
http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=88613961&ac=now
So we did some fairly standard band shots, which I intended popping interesting backdrops on. Their lead singer mentioned the song, so we decided to try and create a golden widow shot. Of course the shot below only has six legs, but if it is good enough for Spiderman, it's good enough for me. I have spent a small age recovering from a green screen disaster since. Ant was wearing a baseball cap that had a green lining under the brim. This pretty much knackered my usual method of photoshopping the background out and lead to several hours messing around with Background Eraser and a little bit of pixel level erasing on a hairdo!
I was also asked to do another photo shoot for Section II, who were practicing at Old Chapel. I was really out of time and couldn't give it the appropriate level of attention. So I will pick up with them and do something a little more thoughtful later. I guess my learning from this one is not to squeeze things in without any planning.
So I now have a huge pile of editing to do, on top of a huge pile of existing editing..... I only actually edit a fraction of the stuff that I actually take, and only a fraction of that will see the light of day.....
These things are sent to try us....
A combination of a broken PC and an insanely busy week have limited my blogging, so here is a brief synopsis.
The week started pretty well apart the demise of my laptop. This didn't used to phase me that much as it just meant watching telly or going to the pub. This was a bad week for the power to go kaput though. Having just launched a website and a blog I really wanted to keep momentum by loading content each day. Difficult to do without the PC though. It really did make me realise how reliant people who trade or use the internet are on their equipment. Anyway, the repair shop have fixed it and life goes on.
The things that were delayed by this unfortunate event were a load of pics from the Eureka Machines video session last Sunday. As I mentioned in my last blog, it was fascinating watching Ash TV work on the shooting of a video. Particularly useful as I am spending some of this weekend shooting snippets for a music video for The March Violets. What I didn't appreciate was quite the level of problem solving that might be involved. I won't go into too much detail as I hope the video will see the light of day and be something a bit different. It has not been without it's problems with two location changes, a huge learning curve on the procurement of props and a few lessons in just how supportive folks in the Leeds music world can be when you are in a spot. Anyway, it is all looking pretty good now and the weekend will hopefully see some amazing footage getting captured for use in two of the songs from the new album.
Today is also one of my favourite events in the Leeds calendar. Light Night Leeds is great for photographers as the whole city centre gets lit up with strange and interesting displays. Hope the weather stays fine and it should be fun to go out with the camera. It almost makes the darkening nights worth it.
Of course you can only have so much light stuff going on in a city at once and there is always a need to balance it with a bit of darkness. So, it will be straight from Light Night to The Fenton where Quasimodo make their debut performance and The Marching Men recreate the classic Sister's secret gig in the upstairs room of a pub.
Nice bit of light entertainment before two days of filming with The March Violets and a photo shoot with Castrovalva.... Hope everyone has a fabulous weekend!
Every Day Is A School Day
Well, that was a properly busy weekend. I'd been a bit nervous about doing a talk to a photography group about music pics for a few weeks. Anyway, I did it and it seemed to go alright. I quite liked doing it after all, even though I blew my script out of the water. I am not sure I convinced anyone that having a go at taking pics at The Library or The Cockpit was actually a good idea. I used a load of images from the last two years and the process of putting it together was quite encouraging. The pics I took at the beginning of 2011 look like a different photographer to the ones from summer 2012 (In my opinion at least). I thought back to the Olympics and the lessons about just improving of your personal bests. Eventually, keep doing that and you never know how good you could be.
The day wrapped up with a trip to the West Yorkshire Playhouse costume department, which was a blast. I really don't know why folks go to fancy dress shops in Leeds rather then there. It has the very best Elvis outfit ever! I will hopefully pop up a few pics from there on my Facebook place.
Today was entirely different. The fabulous Eureka Machines were working on a video for a new song and had asked me to pop down and take some pics. Ash TV were making the video and it was really interesting to see them work. I love their stuff.
Eureka Machines have been a bit of a fixture of the last couple of years for me. I love the energy and sheer showmanship that they bring to any performance. I won't say much about the video, other then it was a fab afternoon meeting some lovely folk supporting a band that deserve to reap the rewards of their efforts...
This week has loads of planning for a video project next weekend and the beginning of a string of gigs that last til Christmas. Main priority is to get my PC working again as the power exploded and I currently can't edit pics! Nightmare!!!
Go Gadget Go...
Today is all about gadgets. One gadget in particular. I am growing to love my radio flash triggers. I bought a set of Pixel King radio triggers a little while back and have been playing with them in conjunction with my Speedlite flashes. I usually make the blanket statement that I don't like flash at gigs, but am re-evaluating this a little. There are certain times when you really need to freeze the action to get a picture and in the light available in most of the places I shoot (I carefully avoided the use of the words 'dingey hell-holes' so as not to offend) there just isn't enough.
So if there is something really interesting, but very action oriented going on (head banging, stage diving, leaping in the air legs akimbo, people hanging from things attached to the ceiling) it is really hard to avoid flash. I have stuck up an action pic from an Acacia Strain pic below to illustrate the point.
The subject of the picture is really the rather beautifully executed stage dive, not the Acacia Strain giving it some on stage. Unfortunately, there was very little light targeted on the ceiling where the stage diver just happened to be at the time, so flash was really the only way. The actual pic on the camera was perfectly exposed according to all the fancy histograms etc, but I just never like them like that. So I turned it black and white, underexposed it a bit, grained it a bit and generally stamped up and down on it with my feet to make it look dirty.
So, back to the gadget that started me thinking about this. One of the Pixel Kings had a wonky hotshoe attachment that I somehow managed to bust at 'Live At Leeds'. I was playing with the idea of my mate Gaz holding the flash up in the crowd some way away from me and triggering the flash remotely by a transmitter on the hotshoe. Of course, this would mean that I wasn't technically breaking the 'no flash' rule and Gaz would actually get thrown out. Anyway, for gig where I didn't have a decoy mate I was going to use a small stand and just position the flash well away from me. Why bother? I hear you ask. Well I think the thing I don't like about flash is the 'in your face' blown out look that it gives, along with revealing all the ugly clutter on stage. By positioning it from an entirely different angle to the camera you could avoid some of the things I dislike. Anyway, to do this I needed the Pixel King fixing, so popped down to the Flash Centre. This is where the big difference comes from using a pro dealer vs high street stores comes in. They swapped the receiver without a moments hesitation. I was well chuffed as I expected to not be able to do anything with it for ages.
So now I can play about with the triggers to my hearts content. Starting with making my homemade lightbox out of a cardboard box, white paper and some perspex..... Don't ask!
Late Breaking News:
My Lightbox experiment worked a treat and I now need to take lots of photos of things that have been sliced... like lemons, limes, eyeballs, that kind of stuff