Emiliana Torrini in Brighton

My love affair with Iceland grew a little stronger the evening I went to see one of my favourite singers Emiliana Torrini in concert at St George's Church in Brighton.  She was good, most excellent good.  However I'll leave the review her concert to others, I want to talk about the photography.

First of all a big thank you to promoters Melting Vinyl for their hospitality on the evening and of course for giving me permission to photograph the gig.

As normal with most gigs you are given the first three songs to get your photos.  I never really thought much about the reason "why three songs?" before this concert.  I just assumed it was enough time for any half competent photographer to rattle off enough photos to get a handful of keepers.

However the more probably real reason as two people explained to me was that you get to take the photos before the artist gets hot and sweaty...  so you get them looking their best.  Makes sense.

On some of the concerts I've seen, the gig doesn't even come alive until several songs in.  The recent series of Peter Gabriel gigs are a good example of this, with the house lights staying on for the first few songs.  Thankfully Emiliana was straight into her set, so no problems there.

For the first time when shooting a concert I used the Olympus OM-D EM-1 along with a 75mm f/1.8 lens.  The more I used my Micro Four Thirds (MTF) system the more I am impressed by it.

Three songs worked out at around 12 minutes and 351 photos.  From which I selected my favourite 12 images, plus a few more candid moments.

Talking to another photographer, who had done his research into Emiliana.  He told me that she nearly always has her eyes closed while she's singing, so if you're waiting for the shot he said, it's probably not going to happen.