Even though I had secured to shoot this gig several months ago, I very nearly didn’t go to the show tonight as I was bordering on exhaustion. With a long week at work coupled with some late nights shooting and editing photographs – had all but taken its toll on me.

Never let anyone tell you otherwise, this is hard work. Granted, it is fun and always an eye-opening experience… but when one works a normal job during the day and then does rock photography purely for love, by night – the day’s do tend to get long, tiring and fatigue inducing.

So after a really tiring day at work which saw me in the most foul of moods as I battled against unrealistic deadlines – I got myself a mighty second-wind and decided to go to the show and shoot away to my heart’s content.

Not too familiar with either band’s repertoire, I didn’t really bother to do any research on the bands’ sound or look. I rocked up cold and left it all to fate.

What will be, will be. I was here to enjoy myself and hopefully, take a decent image or two.

Apologies to local act MM9, I wasn’t in time to see their set. Catching the tail-end of their performance, they seemed to go down well with the gathered crowd.

Chicago’s Soil hit the stage bang on time and I found them to be an impressive, fun, tight band. I’m not a fan of their particular style of Metal but the lads seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves and putting up a cool show for their fans.

Unfortunately for headliners Dope, they were down one band member and all their gear even before their set started. For whatever reason, their bassist wasn’t with them and they were relegated to perform with Soil’s bassist and Soil’s gear.

Still, they tried their guts out and put forth a highly energetic set… for the most part. I only hung around for my allotted 3 songs photo limit – so it would be unfair of me to pass judgement on their overall performance.

Photographically, this is probably going to be my last gig until the new year, so I want to take this opportunity to thank the readers of this site and all who have bothered to leave comments or email. Thanks for sticking with me through this journey and I hope my live music photography has improved enough where you come back and want to see more.

See you in 2010!

I’m not usually a fan of the Metalcore genre. For the most part, it’s raucous nature and somewhat pretentious technical stylings leaves me scratching my head. It sounds like each individual band member is playing a different song.

But I wanted to photograph such a gig and in the end, I was pleasantly surprised with Poison The Well’s set which was injected with melody throughout. I will definitely be checking out some of their discography as frankly, I really liked what I heard tonight.

I’ve shot a couple of times now at the Corner Hotel so I pretty much knew what to expect.

An hour or so before the main act, I went for a brief walk through the room and took some practice shots to get a feel for the limited lights so I could set the right exposure on the camera.

Tonight there was a dedicated photo-pit and I was unsure if the bouncers would let us shoot through the whole set – or we’d get a limited amount of time. At the recent Deathstars show, the pit was all of half-a-foot deep – which made it practically impossible to work in. Thankfully tonight, I had a bit more room to maneuver.

We were granted about 4 songs before the bouncers moved us on, but I managed to stand at the side of the stage and continued to shoot unabated.

I am starting to feel like a bit of a rock photog veteran at times. I am seeing familiar fellow photographers at shows who for the most part – are some of the nicest bunch of blokes (& gals) one could meet. It is always fun trading war stories and I am always eager to hear how a fellow photog does his thing. I’m like a sponge soaking up as much knowledge and tips as I could get.