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There’s no rules in taking photographs, anything captured can be classed as a photograph and all the techniques you read about are merely guidelines / recommendations and aren’t definitive ways of taking amazing photos (well people do love breaking the rules). I try to use a few of the classics when shooting band photos, the main one being the rules of third and not using flash at gigs to capture the stage lights and effects. You still need some guidelines when shooting in the end.
After taking photos of Okkervil River, I’ve added a new rule to my list. Always position yourself to the left. Now why would you have an advantage when taking photos from the left? Is there a blaring good reason why? Can anyone think why without reading my explanation? It’s actually pretty obvious when you think about it and only a factor I’ve become aware of.
Well, last day of my trip (well last day of touristness, the next day I leave but we just had our breakfast and dashed to the station) it was quite a relaxed one, but nonetheless jam packed with places to explore. We were able to check out where amelie worked as well as Sacré Coeur followed by other random places (stalingrad?).
Funny when you write 5 nights in Paris, you would expect 5 parts of this blog entry. Unfortunately (fortunately?) it will only be a 4 parter. Anyway, our next day in Paris we went to see Notre Dame, the Pompidou Center (the French version of Tate Modern) and revisiting the Louvre. I think the shots for today were the best since the view from Notre Dame was amazing, regardless of those damn wires that protected people from jumping off the building.
Continuing from the epic night in Paris, we enter our next day of our little holiday. To recap we’ve been lounging around for 4 hours in a museum and climbing some ungodly stairs up to the eiffel tower. We were slightly lost in the metro and were confused with the vast amounts of sushi places. I must say we did go to the two most important places in Paris since we knew about how long the waits are and just wanted to get it over and done with (the weather was nice and all) before the weekend came and all the tourists came out to play.
We started our morning with some breakfast, Alice brought her Jam along and used it to spread on her croissant whilst I enjoyed it with a touch of butter. The breakfast was the same as yesterday so we were pretty certain that the breakfast is going to be the same throughout. Today we were going to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayete. This store was the equivalent to London’s Harrods or Selfridge’s, a big shopping centre with top quality brands selling top quality stuff at high high prices. We obviously didn’t buy much here but it was definitely fun to look at. Alice bought some nice jewellery and some postcards. Not much happened in the store expect for the story about this random French lady with two chicken fillets (which I’ll tell another day).
Man this was one epic holiday, so much done in such a small time span of 5 nights in the city of Paris. This was my holiday abroad that I was well overdue for and boy was I going to “holyday” in style. Alice had planned to travel Europe for 2 months and one of the stops was Paris which I was very keen in visiting. So we decided that we would meet up and enjoy Paris together, and boy was it amazing.
Each day was jam packed with events and places to visit and take photos of, most of which will pretty much give you an idea of what we done for the 5 nights in Paris. So lets begin with the evening where I arrive in Paris after work and the next day where we visit the Louvre and Eiffel Tower.
I dislike deleting photos I take, these days when I come back from a gig I have about 500 shots that I need to sort out, pick and then upload onto flickr. Now usually in gig environments you’ll discover that there’s a high ratio of crap shots and good shots purely because of crazy fans pushing you, random hands in the way, or the band moving too fast etc but once you throw all them out you have about 100-200 shots of nice shots.
Now what happens next? Do I upload them all? Now if all shots were unique then hell yeah, upload them all, but this is from one gig. A magazine doesn’t show millions of photos for one gig so neither should I. It’s only best to strip out all the similar but not as epic shots and only keep the epic ones. That means comparing them against one and another and SLOWLY killing the photos off. It usually takes hours to do and is a toughie when the photos are all sharp and presentable. I do have a few rules of deciding which photo goes through, usually judging on how interesting the lights are, and how dynamic the musician’s pose is. Once we’ve declared the winners, we start killing loads of photos that are simply “bad duplicates“.
I was able to grab a ticket at the last minute and go see the band play at a very respectable and epic venue, the Royal Albert Hall, which is renowned for it’s awesome acoustics and dazzling lightings (saw a few musicals there beforehand). It was all part of the Teenage Cancer Trust charity and made everyone feel happy inside that they’ve donated some money from it all. Anyway, I’m sure most of the information can be found at Musewiki so I’ll get straight into the review.
Oh and I spoke to a ticket tout (to research on how much they were charging) about buying Muse tickets and he said £70, tut tut. He was willing to go lower but I left since I was quite disgusted.
The gig was spectacular. They did a lot of new things, a lot of right things and all in all it was a rocking gig. When Take a bow came up I immediately gave them the nod of approval knowing full well that if Take a Bow was the opener, Knights of Cydonia will be the last song (which I prefer a lot). The acoustics were amazing as well as the lighting. Their choice of songs were really good, introducing a few new riffs as well as playing some old songs such as Fury which really lighted up the stage for the die hard fans. The highlight would be when Matt got up to the organs and played Megalomania. Really making use of the venue’s facilities. Makes you wonder if that could have been an end song? (Epic but not rocky). From the gig you would have thought Matt had learnt some new facial expressions because he was pulling all sorts of faces during the gig. The highlight songs would have been, Knights of Cydonia, Megalomania, Fury and Bliss. The balloons coming out, although old, felt like it wasn’t done in a long time, probably because you rarely GET to play with the balloons on venues such as Wembley Stadium etc. It reminded me of the Brixton gig due to it’s size and everything.
Anyway, enjoy some photos! I uploaded about 50 shots so be sure to check them all out on my flickr page
Tonight I went to see Gogol Bordello live at Brixton, the gig was pretty epic. Sad thing was I didn’t know they had a few albums I haven’t heard of. Nonetheless it was energetic and jumpy, the band came down to the crowd a few times and it was good haha. Eugene can sweat. Anyway, photos… I managed to smuggle my camera once again so I was able to take some nicer photos 
