The Mercy Beat are an “electrifying” rock band from the inner suburbs of Brisbane (ha! I’m really funny). They play an uncompromising genre blending mix of fast rocky punk. They’ve been described as something similar to The Bronx, but they (and I) kinda disagree with that. Check them out for yourself and decide, I think it’s just downright awesome music, who cares about labels and descriptions?

For the first time, I went into a photoshoot planning only 2 photos. Normally I try and get as many good ones as I can, but this different approach let me really think about what I needed to do well before the actual event. I knew it was going to be a bunch of composites which generally require the greatest amount of planning. The next photo here was something the band had thought of and told me on the evening, thankfully there was enough room in my brain to be able to work that one out as well.

Lighting was simple in my two planned set ups, but for the previous shot we had to do a bit of thinking as it’s a 4 image composite.

left guy: 430EX @ 1/4 through shoot through umbrella very close to head, 580EX with blue gel about 1.5m back and to the right of him @ 1/1
lightning guy: 580EX @ 1/4 + 0.3 into shoot through umbrella directly above with blue gel, 430EX @ 1/2 into reflective umbrella directly below camera
surprised guy: 580EX @ 1/4 with blue gel through shoot through umbrella
right guy: same as left guy but on opposite sides.

The final image is what happens after a lightning strike. Lighting for this shot was again quite simple, just a 580EX into reflective umbrella @ 1/2 directly above and between myself and subjects with a
430EX @ 1/4 directly behind.

If anyone wants me to write up a tutorial on creating lightning or smoke in Photoshop, hit me up.

Well it’s been a long time coming but finally, an update on this blog. It’s been nearly 7 weeks since I’ve had access to the Internet at home and this blog has been on a downward spiral! Not to worry, plenty of images coming our way in the next few weeks.

First up, this is the Dawn Collective, a band I’ve photographed before but have restructured dramatically to become a two-piece.

This last one is a revisit of an older photo which I took when they were a 5 piece.

And the original:

Many thanks to Lauren and and Joseph (the provider of the Alien Bees lights I used on the day) for assisting and helping carry the generator and all those light stands.

If you are particularly observant or stalker like, you might have noticed my flickr stream only contains about 25% of what it did last week. I’ve had a bit of an artistic crisis and feel like a lot of the photos I have on there aren’t as good as I wished they were and made them private. I didn’t have the heart to delete them and I hope that whatever I add onto there in the future fills that void.

But thanks to flickr’s ingenious system of changing filenames when you change them from public to private, all of these images have now disappeared off this blog as well and been replaced with “This photo is currently unavailable”. I’m trying to figure out what the best way to get around this is so your patience is appreciated. While you wait, check out http://youshouldhaveseenthis.com, best website on the internet.

I ventured out to the Hi-Fi Bar to check out UK darling Jamie T along with his band The Pacemakers.

I turned up early to check out Ernest Ellis the support act who had the crowd reasonably entertained with some pretty down the line indie rock.

Jamie T was always going to be a different story. The crowd was excited beyond what I would consider comfortable for a photographer standing squashed against a stage but then again, the kids paid to see Jamie T and not the back of my head.

Lighting, like always at the Hi-Fi was a bit hit and miss. There’s never much white light, mostly yellows and reds mixed in with some green and blue which generally means photos end up in black and white to retain any character of a passable photo.

Brutal.
Powerful.
Loud.

Typically, not three words used to describe a Mariachi band. But those three words describe The Bronx, the US hardcore/punk band, who also released an album of pure Mariachi tracks. The Bronx returned to Brisbane, playing two sets of music, vastly different and at vastly different volumes. Mariachi El Bronx played first and it was just what you’d expect from a Mariachi band. Beautiful, catchy melodic music it was.

The band returned later in the evening and the instant they were on stage, you knew things were going to be different. From the start of their first brutal track, The Bronx destroyed the crowd and their ears. The protection offered by a barrier at the front was useless for us photographers as wave after wave of crowd surfers landed on our heads, their arms and legs flaying.

Photography was tough, mostly red and blue washes but after having disappeared off the photography radar for a month, I had a great time getting back into it.

Life has gotten in the way of maintaining this blog in the last month or so but hopefully it’ll be back into the swing of things really soon. There will hopefully be more photos and more random words that make grammatical sense while concurrently having little intellectual effect on the reader.

Until the age of 12, all I ever wanted to be was an astronaut. I read every book I could get my hands on about space travel and the solar system, I was convinced I’d be an astronaut. Then, nature took hold and I grew to the ripe old height of 6′4" ruining my chances of travelling the universe. But I dealt with it and still have a great fascination for our universe including celebrating last week’s historic 40th anniversary of the Lunar landing. Now seriously, how AWESOME is that? Consider that the lunar module had about as much computer processing power as a modern digital watch and you’ll realise what a feat it was!

Hats off to you Messers Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins!

My last trip back to Wollongong was wholly dedicated to rock gods BugGiRL. I was there to shoot some behind the scenes stuff from their latest single’s video clip and more importantly, to take some promo shots for use inside their EP. We’d already taken some pretty rock’n'roll shots last time I saw them, and we threw around a few ideas until we decided we’d try to recreate the illustrated cover that the EP was having done.

This is the final photo that we came up with (click to go to a larger version) and it’s a 2 page spread on the inside cover.

Much thanks to my usual go-to-photo-assistant-man Rich, and for Soph for creation of the awesome tomato and lettuce bread rolls the band and I consumed as the clock rolled into the very late hours of the night.

Here’s the media release from the Bugger’s record label Impedance Records. Check out the Buggers as they travel around the country!

The raw and wild slab of an EP from BugGiRL is here, produced by Mark Opitz, and ready to sizzle and burn your stereo. You can now buy it by hitting our on-line store. It will be in shops in August(Australia/Europe/UK) and October(North America). The band are currently in California recording their new full length album with Sylvia Massy. Check out some photos from the sessions at www.myspace.com/thebuggers. Finally in news from the Buggirl camp, they have announced a run of Australian shows in August and have also announced some of their upcoming European shows starting in late August, hit our tours page for the dates.

I was sent an email from Rob of The Dawn Collective. It turns out his fiance had gotten some of the DC’s band promo shots I’d taken a while ago and printed them up into huge canvas prints. Awesome-o!

Ireland just passed a law making blasphemy illegal.

The USA has "Christians" firing people with cancer because they’re athiests.

People flock to a tree stump in the UK stating it shows an image of the Virgin Mary.

A man is jailed for 5 years in Iran for ridiculing the Koran.

Mulletgod buys a tshirt of a dinosaur eating the Jesus fish.

The world is going crazy.

I went to one of Brisbane’s most influential live music venues, The Zoo, to check out the phenomenal Wolf and Cub. They’re not a band that’s everyone’s cup of tea, but over time, I’ve slowly been getting into their stuff.

Supporting Wolf and Cub were The Scare, a loud, dissonant in your face band from Sydney.

Opening the night was Brissy locals The Cairos.

Check out the full gallery here

I’m an emotional retard. There seems to be this inability for me to understand how to act in some instances. When life throws me a curve ball, I sit there stewing about what I think I should do. Sometimes I make the right choice while other times I try and figure out ways of avoiding the problem; burying my head in the sand so to speak. I had some pretty comprehensive testing done on me when I was in my early 20s by a friend who needed a case study for his psychology subjects at uni and while I demonstrated above average IQ, I was well below on the EQ. I’m hypersensitive to other people’s emotions but can’t seem to control mine to make the right choices.

I’m Peter Pan; I never want to grow up and make grown up decisions.

Strobist:

Tripod at the centre bottom of image
580EX @ 1/2 into reflective umbrella
430EX @ 1/8 into gobo far back left

Life sometimes gets in the way of this website and this is another case. These are some photos from Australia’s latest hip-hop gods Bliss N Eso who I checked out nearly 2 weeks ago. They’ve been around for a couple of years and after a lot of hard work, they’re headlining their very own sold out national tour. Proof that hard work and some good tracks can get you anywhere.

Bliss N Eso were supported by Pez, who became almost instantly famous with last years song “The Festival Song”.

Check out the full gallery including more shots at The Dwarf.

For a band that thrives on a lunatic-like tour schedule, Cog have been quiet for what seems an eternity. Their last album, Sharing Space, has been available for nearly a year and the band has been quiet in Australia since touring for that album. I figured since I’m a newbie in Brisbane, I’d check out some of the local venues with the HiFi Bar being one of the newer, and theoretically one of the better venues. How wrong I was.

Cog, as always, were great but the HiFi Bar just can’t seem to figure out how to do some things. When I go to see a band, I don’t just go to see them, I want to be deaf at the end of it. The HiFi Bar’s sound is one of the worst I’ve ever heard at a gig, it sounds so empty and hollow. I saw The Drones a couple of weeks back and the sound was equally bad so it’s fair to say the blame doesn’t lay at the hands of the sound engineers. I felt like I was listening to a Cog bootleg, recorded by some guy with a microphone hidden in his hat, it was seriously that bad. Secondly, having the multi-tier system is great for visibility, but in terms of getting in or out of the photo pit/floor area, it’s an absolute joke. We’d all be dead if there was a fire.

Anyways, enough ranting, photos ahead.

Cog were supported by UK prog/art rockers Oceansize (and Calling All Cars who I didn’t arrive in time to see). I thought Oceansize also suffered from bad sound but I enjoyed their stuff regardless. I’m not sure about a lot of other people though, the strange chords, time signatures and structures looked like it was freaking out a few punters…

I’ve spent my whole life trying to make other people happy. I often end up in a position where I tend to make decisions that provide comfort for others while doing exactly the opposite for myself.

Making decisions for yourself doesn’t make you selfish, and realisation of this is something that takes time.

It feels like it’s been ages since I posted a 52, and I guess that’s just one instance where I’m making a decision for myself. I’m tired, I’ve had so much stuff to do and I decided that this is something I can delay to give me a life that resembles something normal.

Strobist: 580 EX @ 1/8 into shoot through umbrella camera right, 430 EX @ 1/2 gelled blue.

The smoke is provided by my friend aknacer. Thanks mate!

I have a bad habit of sometimes saying stuff without thinking. Like the time when I was working as a shoe salesman in high school and told a person that the shoe they were trying on was a ladies shoe. That person’s friend then proceeded to tell me that their friend was actually a woman.

Strobist: 580EX @ 1/8 into partially collapsed reflective umbrella camera right, 580EX @ 1/4 into reflective umbrella camera top left, 430 EX @ 1/8 into snoot top camera right slightly behind for hair light.