A Comedy Of Errors

It's been a rubbish week for live music. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, one way or another. Here's a quick rundown of why I haven't seen any live music in the last five days.

Thursday - Opinicus @ West Street Live


Fellow Sheffielders Opinicus put on a live gig at West Street Live. This is a good thing. It was a free gig. This was a very good thing. I went alone, and took my camera in case I got an opportunity to try out some shots with my fancy fast lens. All set for a reasonable night. Unfortunately the first support came on.

Necrogrinder. The name should tell it all, really. They were "extreme metal", which I've come to realise means "not very good metal". While the lead singer alternately screeched and belched into the microphone, the three guitarists hammered their instruments while apparently ignoring the fretboard entirely. I've no idea what the drummer was doing. But with their mercifully short (circa 20 second) songs at least they got rid of it quickly.

Sadly they decided to take their "extreme"ness to an, erm, extreme and went for deliberately and boringly tasteless song titles. Not that the titles had anything to do with the songs, all of which sounded the same and had no discernible lyrics.

Anyway, that went on a while and I decided that I couldn't sit through any more of that hoping that the good stuff would arrive. I was on my own so couldn't even chat to people while waiting. Very dull indeed.

Sunday - Volbeat @ Corporation


I was looking forward to this one. Having recently discovering them, and previously reviewing the album, I was in the mood for some relatively up tempo rock and roll metal. Sadly vocalist Michael Poulson is unwell and the band have been forced to cancel the entire first week of the UK tour. And to top it off, there were literally no other gigs in Sheffield that night except a folk supergroup at Plug. Rubbish. We went to see Skyline at the cinema instead. It was rubbish.

Monday - Vampire Weekend @ O2 Academy


Nothing technically wrong with this gig. In fact, I should be there as I write this post. But I'm not. Because for the last two days the city has been at a standstill due to snowfall, and we know for a fact that if we venture into town and the snow comes down, we ain't getting home again without a very long walk. So we're missing it, despite nary a flake to be seen.

Next March - Within Temptation @ Shepherd's Bush Empire Brixton Academy


We got the tickets early for this one. A two day trip to the capital for a night of music, fun and drink and a leisurely drive home the next day. Great idea. Thankfully we didn't book the nearby hotel because a couple of days after buying the tickets, the venue changed. Dodged that bullet.

Then we discover that not only has the venue changed, but so has the date. Onto the one day in November we simply cannot go. And to top if off, further dates in Manchester and Birmingham have been added. If they had been an option in the first place, would the original venue have sold out? Probably not.

The reason for the shift is genuine enough. Sharon den Adel is pregnant and can't be touring next March. Can't really argue with that. But the planning and communication of this entire tour has been a nightmare. Changing venues, moving dates, adding more venues after months of ticket sales ... it's just not helping the fans support the band.

And so there it is. In a mere five days I've managed to see no live music (I don't count Necrogrinder as music) and found that the big gig of 2011 is in question. Hopefully we can get tickets for the Manchester show.

Meh.

Purified In Blood and Opinicus @ Corp - Photo Review

A few weeks ago I posted about the new camera I bought to try and get back into my waning photography hobby. This was in part to give me something to do, and in part to improve the photos I was taking at gigs. As I said at the time, the Canon A570 I was using just didn't cut it and caused me much frustration.

Sadly the Fuji S5700 I posted about broke after about a day. The flash simply won't pop up at all. This is OK for some circumstances, but for general photography, it's simply no good to not have a flash. So I've replaced it using Fuji's generous "repair or replace" policy with a Fuji S1600, the S5700's more modern descendant. It's a very similar camera, with improvements in some areas and lacking in others. The lens doesn't step down beyond f6.2, for example, but I can get 480mm (35mm equiv) telephoto out of it. The two are about on a par.

To give it a "trial by fire" I took it to the Purified In Blood gig at Corporation to try it out. And trial by fire is right. There were hardly any lights and the conditions were so bad that even people with far fancier kit than I were having trouble getting anything of worth. Even at ISO 6400 (yes, 6400) I could only get shutter speeds of around half a second. Not great when the band are whirling about the stage at breakneck speed. So it came down to patience and just a little bit of cheating.

Up first were Merciless Terror, with perhaps the worst lighting of the lot. I didn't get anything even worth critiquing from that lot. Most of the pictures were a red-hued blur. So on came Opinicus.

I will confess that Opinicus got most of the cheating. With shutter speeds approaching 3 seconds it was impossible to do much of anything, so I switched to ISO 400 and broke out the flash and stepped down the power by about ⅔ EV. Naughty! It did seem to work, though, albeit without the atmosphere provided by the dim lighting in an all black club.

You'll notice the four red lights at the back. Along with two at the front, this was it. Didn't stand much of a chance. So I tried to include as much of the band as possible and see what I could do.

This is what the attempts basically boiled down to. Take a photo with low power flash by waiting for something vaguely cool looking to happen, then crop mercilessly to make it resemble a half decent photo. These are certainly better than the blurry, grainy mess I've been used to, though, so chalk one up for the Fuji.

Between sets I decided to try and take some pics of the stage and capture some of the ambience. I tried to steady the camera by putting it on a flat surface in front of the stage. Unfortunately, the only such surface was on top of a large speaker stack that was playing some random music very loud. The camera shake is not my hands - it's the vibration of the cabinet!

A close up of the drum kit demonstrates the problem with vibration quite nicely. Using a 2 second self-timer to release the shutter, I was nowhere near the camera at the time the picture was taken. The shake is still clearly evident

As Purified In Blood were setting up, I thought I'd just grab one more. After all, even a metalhead has to hydrate. Thankfully, it seems that for the headliners the lighting was brought up substantially. This made for some interesting photographs.

And so Purified In Blood take to the stage. Even with the improved lighting I'm still getting quarter second shutter speeds. But that's not always a bad thing. With creative use of motion blur, some pretty cool pictures can result. And by ensuring that camera shake doesn't ruin it and by keeping the stage area focused and clear, the motion of the band members doesn't look bad at all.

Every so often, though, everything just fell right. A slow moment in the song (of which there were precious few) meant that I could grab pictures like this. Much better!

This one is, I think, incredibly cool. I'm not sure if it was a sudden change in the lighting or somebody else's flash going off, but the bands faces are all but blown out. However, the composition I love, and it really captures the moment. And that, after all, is what a photograph is for.

Once again making use of the slow shutter to capture the moment rather than reducing the picture to a blur of colour. This picture also captures the moment really well. The fact that Glenn Cato Rasmussen stayed mostly still during this shot means that the splash of colour on his jacket ties the whole thing together.

Cheated again for this one and used flash. I don't know why, but I find this photo particularly amusing. Maybe it's the pose? The composition is slightly off, and could have done with being a touch to the right. The flash has completely destroyed any lighting effects. But here it is. It's not bad.

But enough of "not bad". Here is, in my humble opinion, the Photo Of The Evening. A quarter second exposure during a long scream and we have a picture that captures the movement and atmosphere of the moment with clarity and colour. Really very pleased with this picture, and it cements in my mind that it was a good idea to pick up this new camera. Less limitations of the equipment mean more opportunities for cool pictures. I just need to get a little more used to how this particular model behaves in different low light conditions so I don't have 40 terrible practice pics before they start getting good.

And in case you were wondering, the gig was fantastic. The air was buzzing, the kids were (sort of) dancing, the band were amazing. A great gig, and a great evening.