the importance of having long lenses

I wasn't too worried about my not having anything longer than my 90mm 2.8 Tamron for concerts until I was standing in the photo pit of Rabarock Festival in Estonia in June 2008, seeing Helloween play on a stage this high:


Took that one with 17mm just to demonstrate how small I felt down there with my 167 cm which isn't even short! So I was happy to have at least my 90mm lens for Rabarock and ended up getting portraits like this:


The lens is a really good lens, but it doesn't give you many choices for framing. Especially when being in the pit, having the first three songs for shooting which means not much space and not much time for trying out stuff. At least for me. So I've been wanting a good 70-200mm lens for concert shooting ever since. Dear Santa... ;)

I must admit the stage was also a kind of a turn off for me as far as large festivals are concerned. A stage like that and it being outside (= the light is flat and boring) is not a very intriguing combination. However, with some luck and good timing it's possible to get energetic and interesting shots as well. The Japanese band Electric Eel Shock was the best band to take photos of in Rabarock, their stage show was just amazing.

So, even though my tent was flooded (it rained almost all the time) and I didn't get much sleep...



...even though I hit my left leg really painfully on an iron rod and mosquitos massacred my legs...




...Rabarock was made worth while by the hilarious, energetic, fun guys of Electric Eel Shock.

sometimes dreams come true

Last February I got to shoot my first huge gig in a stadium. Nightwish was playing and the Hallenstadion in Zurich was sold out. That meant that while being in the photo pit, there were 13 000 people celebrating Nightwish behind me and Nightwish playing in front of me. Something to make a young, inexperienced photographer humble ;) I didn't wet my pants, but it was an awesome feeling. The energy was amazing. The trouble was that our space was strictly limited between two basses so it wasn't too much. And there was this one guy who kept on pushing me aside :P What an asshole. The other ones were really nice and polite, the way I'm used to, acting according to the unwritten rules of photo pit manners. We also only had two songs instead of the normal three first ones, which fortunately were quite long songs ;)

What I really enjoyed was the great lighting. There was really enough of the light (except on Tuomas) and it was beautiful anyway.


I think I managed to capture a couple of really nice situations which still makes me very happy. Considering I'm still rather a beginner, the results looks actually quite nice. I was also still quite ill that evening, I had been ill all week, but hey how could I have missed an opportunity like this.

After the gig I was invited to the after party and yeah, I had a great time with the people ;) Ewo with his Ville Vallaton-drinks was really funny. I went to him to say hi and before he said hi back he gave me a glass, made me a Ville Vallaton and then shook hands with me :D

I want to thank my friends Maarit and Jarkki again for making that evening possible through their contacts and Marco for organizing the passes for me. See you some time soon :)

Cheers,
Ilona

bleak origin, part I

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kamel

A working colleague of mine told me last week their band is playing in Liberte (Kallio, Helsinki) on coming (i.e. now last) Friday. I thought I'd give it a go and support the band by going to see them. So I took my camera with me as well and lucky me I did! Not only did they play well, the singer Toni was a very charismatic performer and took eventually his shirt off ;) Somehow he reminds me of young Iggy Pop here.

His style was pretty dandy and vain. Not his clothes as much as his way of performing though. He was flirting with the few people who were there, giving his best and really managed to get some people on the dance floor to have a party. Anyway, these guys need more gigs, why don't you just book them ;) Listen to them here.

I put up an interactive show with Toni over there, quite funny actually. I had made a HOUSUT POIS!-poster (pants down in English) and showed it to them and Toni was making gestures of me having to pay him for doing that. I coincidentally had my wallet in my hand as I was heading towards the bar to get another beer and I just waved it in my hand and he reacted and I decided to play the demanding one and just "told" him to bugger off with his cost demands. Apparently other ones had their fun as well since people were smiling. Hey I just gotta love that rock n roll!

Cheers,
Ilona

flashback

I shot my first concert ever on 1. May 2006 in Zurich. It was a free concert organized on Helvetiaplatz. I still had my D50 then and absolutely no clue about any concert photography. So I just did everything intuitively :) See more photos from that concert here. It was so much fun and I knew that this is my thing. It took a long time though to shoot my next concert, which was already a small festival: the Burgdorfer Rocknight.

This was shot in the Burgdorfer Rocknight on 19 November 2006. My first real gig shooting ever. With a photo pass, you know ;) This occasion was immensely important to me since that's how I got to know one of my dearest friends, Patrick, who was one of the promoters and masterminds of Rocknight. I considered him arrogant at that time - how wrong I was! That way I also got to know the whole Bleak Origin band and the other members became my dear friends as well.

In that photo Roland of Deadsoul Tribe shows off with his dreadlocks. I'm still quite satisfied with this shot though I'd prolly try and compose it otherwise now. You shoot, you learn :) I'll never forget the excitement and passion that was glowing inside me. I knew I wanted to do concert shooting, I wanted it so badly. After this Rocknight I knew it was my true passion, one of the few things I was able to concentrate on over a longer time and where I had true ambitions.

Here's another shot from that night. It's Rollz of Deadsoul Tribe. He had been injured earlier and was sitting on a chair during part of the show. The yellow light and the smoke create a pretty intense atmosphere here although there is nothing much happening in the picture as such.


In the Burgdorfer Rocknight I also got the first bitter lesson about the difficulty of getting decent shots of drummers and developing a certain kind of love and hate-relationship to the light engineers... ;) This was the best I could do that night and I must say it hasn't become much easier ever since if you have to shoot the whole gig from the pit or first row and have no chance to climb on stage:
That's Niko of Dark Suns.

Have a look at the whole Rocknight set on my flickr account or on the Rocknight 2006 gallery.

Cheers,
Ilona

karoshi lovers

Before Klaus Thunder ja Ukkosmaine Karoshi Lovers were playing their set. They were once again great live and their music really is something fresh for your ears. I like their outlooks, it's a pity they have played in places where the lighting is "challenging" (reads: crappy ;)) and they haven't been very well lit. Oh well, I've only shot them twice so far and I hope to get to shoot them many times again. I decided to choose two images from them, two different kinds of images. One is peaceful, one has more action in it.



Kid Karoshi is depicted in this picture. I chose this one since it is somehow deviant from the average gig shot. It could almost be posed to be a still life. However, there's more to it when you look at it more carefully. The light is as such not very interesting, but still I like it. I like the subtle motion blur of the left hand and the shadows. An elegant portrait of a musician playing death pop :)


This is an interesting photo in that sense that there is action with Kid Karoshi moving and yet Ms. Stress is sitting behind her keyboard, not moving. Technically this is not a very good image, but I've learned to oversee those things sometimes if the picture is otherwise interesting.

During Karoshi Lovers I had no problems with space. I actually noticed when I stopped shooting in front of the stage that there was a space around me, I wonder if people somehow intuitively had left me that space. Awkward. As a photographer, I don't want to take anybody's space nor do I want to be in anyone's way. But it's difficult not to if there's no pit. It's a dilemma really: you have your space and peace to photograph in a pit (except sometimes some photographers can be real asses to their colleagues), but it's difficult to take the audience with into the pictures; when there's no pit you have to be careful with everything and you often have no space, but then again the atmosphere is great and the audience really close.

Cheers,
Ilona

klaus thunder

So in lack of a proper website (anyone willing to design and program one for me cheap or even for free? ;)), I decided to create a photoblog. Here I want to represent my gig photography, which is my great passion. Any comments highly appreciated!

In this first picture the guy is Klaus Thunder from the band Klaus Thunder ja Ukkosmaine. They make funny elektro pop in Finnish and they're best experienced live. One of the funniest shootings I've had for some time :) I had to be really inventive, since the lighting was a challenge and I was in the first row (no photo pit in Semifinal), surrounded by a dense crowd of eager (mostly) female fans. I couldn't move at all so changing positions was out of question. I had to shoot everything from the same position. So I decided to try to take the audience with into the pictures. The interaction was really great. I really hope I get to shoot the band again, they were so much fun :)

Cheers,
Ilona