22 August 2014

When Goldfrapp played Greenwich

A pause in posting Rewind Festival photos for a few of Goldfrapp from their concert at the Old Royal Naval College.

I may have been a very naughty boy on the evening of the concert. I may have stood next to the official press pass holding photographers and pretended I was one of them. This may have happened. I may also have been asked to stop talking by someone listening to the concert (normally one of my pet hates, so I did, stop that is). I also may have been asked to stop shooting twice by security. The second time I did actually stop because I really did want to see the rest of the gig... which was by all accounts rather good indeed.

I'm slowly working my way through photographing my favourite singers, and it's rather awesome to be able to do so... Emiliana Torrini and Tom Bailey in the last few months alone. It would be nice to thing I could add Kate Bush to the list, but she seems rather camera shy, so that seems unlikely.

Never before at a concert have I seen the queue for tea and coffee longer than the one for beer. It probably had something to do with the fact that it was rather chilly.

This was the first outdoor gig I've been to in London, and it was quite something listening to the sounds of Goldfrapp echoing (in a good way) around the 300 year old buildings of the Naval College, while looking out on Canary Wharf across the river.

As you'll be able to see from the photos, the photography pit was actually about 40 rows back behind the front block of seating. This made shooting a bit of a challenge. For the close up shots of Allison I was using the long end of a 300mm lens, at 3200 iso and struggling to get shutter speeds faster than 1/50 second (it's a very slow lens, f/6.7 wide open at 300mm. It's at times like this when I realise the true value of the Olympus image stabilisation system and just how damn good it really is.


Hardly the greatest set of concert photos ever, but given the situation, I'm rather happy with them.

A shout out to the special ladies I met on the evening, especially to the one who bought me tea and cake!











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