My Musical Photo weekend from The Hoosiers to the midimidis

Ok, firstly the Serious stuff!

My best friend and my Dad have both been diagnosed with cancer in the last few weeks, and I’m doing my best to stay positive for both of them. So I would ask if any of you have had the benefit of my photos for free and enjoyed them, consider making a donation to Marie Curie cancer through my mate Steve White who’s running the London Marathon to support them. It’s easy to hear that one in three if us will get it and not realise that means us!

So now, on to the fun stuff….

Friday night I was invited to my first gig at Reading’s Rising Sun Arts Centre, I went to see the midimidi’s who I really love and for a first look at 60 Watt Bayonets who are going to be Reading’s Next Big Thing I hope. The Centre is run on love and friendship and lots of volunteers – so support it and go see bands there!

Midimidis

60 Watt Bayonets

Spectators

A great time was had by all, many reportedly ending up at the After Dark for afters – lol.

So on to Saturday night – probably my favourite night’s photography since I took up this crazy hobby! I was so lucky to get a photo pass to the Hoosiers gig at Carling Academy Oxford, and luckier still that the line up was so damn brilliant. The Hoosiers excelled themselves – its my 3rd time seeing them live and they go from strength to strength. It’s a shame that so few people realise that Irwin Sparkes is a local Reading boy, we should all be proud of his achievment!

The Script are a true Irish rock band – with soul and class, I can’t wait to see them headline!

I really liked I AM FINN until my fiancee wouldn’t stop going on about how fit the singer was, and how she and her friend were hoping for his trousers to fall down. Apparantly he has sexy pelvic bones, and he looks like a young Axl Rose!

Let’s not forget those who made the effort to dress up for The Hoosiers!

And lastly onto Sundays marathon day taking promo shots for Whitley band Vivacity. There’s been a lot of argument about how their name is pronounced – but I can tell you from the Horse’s Mouth its (viv acity) like audacity NOT Viva City!!!!

So, I finally got do my my photo shoot with the Vivacity boys, what a brilliant day!

I’d been pretty nervous leading up to Sunday, lots on my mind last week, and Gigs Friday and Saturday night too. This was going to be my first real attempt to take band pics away from my comfort zone, the “live gig”. I prepared by buying myself a little laptop to check out the pics as we went along – I couldn’t bear the idea of getting home and finding no useable shots after waiting 6 weeks to get time with the boys. I also tried to plan out locations and lots of ideas to try too.

Finding out that most of the roads around Reading would be closed due to the half marathon made life a little harder too – but we managed to drive around and miss all the road blocks by a hair’s breadth.

Once we’d parked in the Town centre, everything seemed to go smoothly, taking shots in 6 or 7 different locations, and ending up at the good old Oakford Social Club for the last shots and a chance to upload the 600 odd shots ready to review.

It was really good reviewing and rating the pics with Vivacity there and then, normally after a gig I spend 3 to 4 hours cutting down the shots to the most usable to upload, so having the 3 boys do that for me took a lot of the pressure off – and was also surprising because I think they picked shots i would have binned and visa versa in some cases. In the end we ended up with 33 top shots and about 80 they’d rated as 4*. So I’m happy!