Traces Of The Real

Dublin’s Grand Canal Theatre opened this year amid much fanfare. It’s a 2000-odd capacity theatre, situated in the Docklands, and designed by Daniel Libeskind. I managed to sneak my way in courtesy of my friend Dave O’Grady of Independent Records who, among other things, manages Josh Ritter. It was quite a strange experience as the staff obviously mistook me for someone important. I turned up and was ushered inside, up and down lifts, through the backstage area and eventually out onto a high balcony stage right. While this offered an incredible view of proceedings it was completely wrong for this type of photograph so, thanks to a co-operative lighting engineer, I ended up setting myself up downstairs at the back instead.

It’s a fantastic place. Plush seating and pin-drop acoustics. Having no idea what sort of exposure would be right for the venue I banged off about 8 different ones at various f-stops – most of them between 5 and 10 minutes duration. As always with big venues, the powerful lighting on stage can completely overwhelm the shot and leave the audience too dark but I think the one above works fairly well. The reason I like it is because the the huge shadow of the head of the double-bass that is cast up onto the backdrop far above the band – it makes the performers look dwarfed by this instrument, as if any minute now some giant is going to crash out from behind the stage and start plucking away on the huge bass.

Unfortunately this didn’t happen, but what did happen was that eventually the moment arrived (and this happens at all seated gigs) when the audience collectively decided to get up off their seats and start shaking a leg, thus blocking my camera’s view of the stage, so I had to stop. While I think I got a good shot, there’s a better one to be had from the dead centre of the first tier of circle seating. There was obviously going to be someone sitting there on that night so it wasn’t possible, but maybe next time …