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“.
Once all that is done, next thing is mining out rare gems. Sometimes you can take perfect shots and they require very little photoshopping or editing to make it good, but there are cases where you actually need to crop or “black and whitify” the photos in order to make the photo nicer, usually killing distractions or focusing into the musician, and sometimes these cropped or edited photos beat those natural ones. It’s more apparent with gig photography since you need to immediately focus people’s attention on the band so sometimes it’s important to get that kick and draw nailed.
So yeah, an example is this bad boy.
It’s a nice shot, but the background is quite distracting, it’s wide because when shooting, I wanted to shoot him and his foot on the pedal. But when it came on the screen, it wasn’t really that interesting, and when zooming in, I discover that the shot is pretty sharp so I was able to actually crop this and focus on just the top half of Matt, and here’s the end result.
You’ll notice that this photo has a better impact since it focuses on the subject more. The crowd is quite distracting but meh, they’ll stay for now haha. This crop was done a day after uploading the photos, I was slowly swotting down photos that people weren’t keen on looking at to keep the photo count down, but this one seemed like one of those “hmm, if i cropped it, perhaps it will look better”, and it really did. It’s definitely tough work post processing these bad boys, at the end of the day I tend to stick with about 20-30 photos (the amount you can take with the disposable camera usually) I broke the boundries with Muse but hey, it’s Royal Albert Hall :p.
So yeah, when sorting out photos, it’s a pain, but if you put the time and effort you’ll yield excellent results. I hope you all enjoyed the photos, thanks for commenting on them and all.
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
The best shot! It looks epic in big!
Looks like Matt has on tooth here!
and why not, some Matt pouting, he did this pout right after Butterflies and Hurricanes, it’s weird to think you’d make that face at the last note of it.
Anyway, what did YOU think of the gig? Post your review and experiences, how awesome was the organs for you?
I’ll be having a nice 1 week + holiday so I won’t be blogging much / at all, during that period. So yeah, thought I’d be nice and release one of my slightly hidden covers that I did last year. This is using pro tools so it’s slightly cooler but it’s all recorded pretty live which gives it that very raw edge. Unfortunately I sing in this one, this is probably the only cover you’ll ever hear me sing. I don’t like singing because my voice sucks and I don’t think it’ll get any better so yeah. First ever song where I really went all out on trying to get mixing and mastering done right, my first shot at it and all so I’m still learning. So yeah, I’ll be up north now, enjoy.
Well folks, I’m sure you’ve all been lovely people and bought yourself a copy of Muse Haarp DVD. Would like to know what you thought of the DVD. I unfortunately am steering clear for it for now since I’m still savouring the vue cinema experience and all. Will hopefully get it soon or something and will report back here. Other than that, what did YOU think of it, a predictable poll would be in order but I’ll save that in a bit 
I’m sure you’ve all heard of Muse’s new direction of wanting to exclusively release singles instead of albums. If not head to nme and read their article. It’s quite a unique move, but there are obvious pro’s and con’s attached to the idea. Lets run through them
Pro’s
- It’s unique, I’m sure it’s done in the past but to be fair, it’s not the norm now is it? But hey, you can’t make an omlet without breaking some eggs, and by eggs i mean the songs in an album, and by omlet i mean an album? I don’t know, to be honest I actually just wanted to use that phrase in the entry
- Shorter times for song delivery, songs are released more sparodicly due to the lack of dependancy to release a batch of songs colletively.
- More raw tunes? I’m predicting this move will generate more spontaneous and raw tracks, the thing with releasing an album is you have loads of time to redo a song if needs be, so if you’ve recorded track 1, and halfway recording you go “hmm, perhaps we could add arrppegios on track 1″ and bam, changes made, this can be considered a pro or a con if you ask me since adding stuff to a song can welcome in the double edged sword theory (felt like saying fury but perhaps too cheesy?)
- Muse can technically make more money with singles than an album since the only way of buying the song is to buy the single, with the album you can pretty much scrap the singles unless they put B sides on them (and not stupid live tracks)
Cons:
- There’s no “collective” feel. Albums can generally have themes and atmospheres attached to theme, releasing just singles won’t have that same feeling.
- Fans will have to pay more to collect all the singles
- Not much impact compared to releasing an album, even the HAARP dvd seems to be bringing in attention and whatnot, having it released one by one will lose that build and wait that some of us love
- We’ll miss epic listening parties that sometimes the fans can share, I dont know how many people went to the Absolution listening party but that was beyond epic. It was played inside the London Planeterium and it really captured the feel of it with the visuals etc. The Muse HAARP at vue screening was also another epic event.
There’s probably more which I’ll add if I can think of many, suggest some too 
In my honest opinion, I would rather have the band release album to generate more momentum when the album is released, the bummer is when these albums get leaked and distributed before they are release and unless you are reviewing the album, it’s just not cool anymore.
So yeah, another poll on whether or not this is a good idea…
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