Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘stages’

National Concert Hall

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , on October 14, 2010| 3 Comments »

This is a photo taken in Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It’s mainly a venue for classical concerts, and in fact I have a dim memory of being brought to the first ever piano recital that was held there. These days they seem to cater for a fairly wide range of other forms of music too and I have found myself there twice over the last year or so.  It’s a beautiful space but for some reason I hadn’t really thought about making it part of this project until Leagues O’Toole of Foggy Notions suggested it to me one night. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Yeh Deadlies

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , on October 2, 2010| 2 Comments »

This is the Yeh Deadlies playing in Whelans last month. They were supporting a band called Harlem, who were like an American version of Supergrass – yes, that bad. The Yeh Deadlies however, were really good, and they have the best band name in Dublin. This is what they sound like.

Read Full Post »

Road Records Night

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , , on September 19, 2010| 1 Comment »

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. (more…)

Read Full Post »

The Ones That Got Away

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , on August 31, 2010| 3 Comments »

This is LogikParty playing in Whelans on August 11th. They were part of a three-band u:mack bill headlined by Liars and also featuring Cap Pas Cap. My photos of Liars and Cap Pas Cap didn’t turn out right at all – they were all way too dark. This was surprising as the exposure times for the Liars shots in particular were actually longer than the LogicParty ones. I have a whole list of bands I have shot where the pictures have just not come out properly, the ones that got away as it were. Off the top of my head these include Dinosaur Jr, Mission of Burma, Devendra Banhart and Wolf Parade. Taking long exposure shots on film in a darkened venue is a pretty hit and miss process and sometimes it just doesn’t work. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Freezing Time

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , on August 24, 2010| Leave a Comment »

One of the things that interests me about long-exposure photography is that it facilitates a different way of seeing. It compresses a stretch of time into a single visual and, in doing so, uncovers patterns and movements that we do not normally experience. Conventional photography employs shutter speeds that are designed to roughly correspond to our normal view of the world. The camera’s job is to freeze a discrete instantaneous visual moment and allow us to peruse it at leisure. If a photographer inadvertently uses a shutter speed that is too long to properly freeze the moment in front of the lens, the blurred result is more often than not regarded as incorrect, a mistake. But surely it can be more interesting to try and use a camera to uncover things our visual system does not show us, rather than to simply replicate the things that it does? (more…)

Read Full Post »

All About The Lights

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , on August 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

This is bouncy sing-along US pop-punk types The Get Up Kids playing in The Village back in June. I shot a few gigs in The Village back at the beginning of this project but was never happy with the results. It wasn’t possible to get the crowd into the shot, and instead the composition would be dominated by the two giant speaker stacks on either side of the stage and the large empty space above the performer’s heads. This time though I brought along a different lens, one with a longer focal length. This meant I could get in tight on the band and exclude more or less everything else, and it made the world of difference. (more…)

Read Full Post »

A Whole Lotta Cake

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , , on August 8, 2010| 3 Comments »

This is The Jimmy Cake playing in Whelans a few months back. I’ve seen The Jimmy Cake numerous times over the last decade but I’ve never been a huge fan. In fact, within my own band, the term jimmycakery has long been used to refer to any kind of musical over-elaboration, or unnecessary additional instrumentation. However, I’ve caught them three times over the last year or so and found myself really enjoying their new stripped down incarnation. They still do insanely long songs but now they are built on noisy repetitive Krautrock-style riffs and grooves and it really works. (more…)

Read Full Post »

The Music In My Head

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , on July 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »

This is Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba playing in the Button Factory back in May. These guys are from Mali which, as everyone knows (or at least as everyone should know), is the source of a whole load of amazing music. For those yet to discover the delights of West African music I would recommend Mark Hudson’s book, The Music In My Head, which is a highly entertaining account of an English music journalist’s adventures in West Africa after falling in love with the sounds of Senegal and Mali. It will make you want to pick up as much of the music as possible, but handily enough, there is an accompanying CD, which is a superb introduction. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Grand Canal Theatre

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , , on June 30, 2010| 1 Comment »

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. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Now They Are Four

Posted in Bands, Photography, tagged , , , , on June 21, 2010| 2 Comments »

This is the awesome Sea Dog, shot in Whelans, on the same night as the Patrick Kelleher photo I put up earlier.  It’s a 7.5 minute exposure taken, according to my notes, while they were playing a song called “Free Beer”. Sea Dog used to have three members but recently added a bass player to make it four. I’m still not used to this.

This blog got a bit of a plug in the Irish Independent last Friday, something I am very happy about. Check out what they had to say here.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »