Traces Of The Real

This is The Redneck Manifesto playing at the Road Records farewell gig on September 10th. It was a fantastic night, and a fitting send-off for Dublin’s greatest ever record shop. Road was far more than just a shop, it quickly became the hub of a whole community of music fans and musicians. In the end though, this wasn’t enough to sustain it. The ease of accessing music on digital formats, whether by legitimate or non-legitimate means, combined with the reductions in disposable income that most of us are going through these days, meant that the trip into town on a Saturday afternoon to stock up on new CDs or vinyl LPs became a luxury that many just couldn’t afford anymore. It’s a terrible shame to see it go, but then again, 13 years is a pretty good run, and Dave and Julie can look back with pride on all they managed to achieve during their time on Fade St. In an indirect way, Dave from Road (will he ever be known as anything else?) is partly responsible for this blog, as many years ago he helped spark my interest in photography by lending me an old Olympus OM-10 to play around with – and I’m still at it.

The farewell party, organised by u:mack,  was originally scheduled to happen in August but moved to September to allow the Redneck Manifesto to play. I can’t think of a band more apt to headline the Road send-off. They started around the time the shop first opened its doors and one of their first releases was a split 7″ single with The Idiots on the RoadRelish label which Dave set up. Since then, they have released a bunch of brilliant albums, become one of the best live bands you’re likely to see anywhere, and inspired countless others by expanding the parameters of what’s possible for an independent band in Ireland. While all the other acts on the night were great (Cian Nugent, Patrick Kelleher, Female Hercules and Legion Of Two), it was the Rednecks that really lifted the roof off the place at the end of the night.

The shot above is a combination of a six minute exposure and an eight minute exposure digitally combined together. This is something I have been experimenting with recently as a way of getting over the problem of the difference in light levels between the stage and crowd. The dynamic range is too great to capture detail in both, but if you make a number of different exposures then with a bit of luck the stage will look right in one, and the crowd will look right in the other. As long as the camera is locked into position on the tripod, then after scanning the negatives, they can be combined to get the right shot. It’s essentially High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography using multiple exposures on film.

Here’s another first for this blog. The video below was shot by Conor of Trig films, who was standing right beside me filming while I was taking the photographs. The video is the moving version of my still version.