Basilica Soundscape Festival

In my continuing journey of becoming/being a concert photographer, I feel like it's important to show you the work I'm not so proud of. Not every shoot goes the way you expect. Not every venue has the best, or in this case ANY, light. Not every festival is for you. The Basilica Soundscape Festival was probably the least enjoyable shoot I've had this year. I covered it with Adam over on StGA and you can read his completely accurate review right here. It was pretentious. It was full of music I want nothing to do with. It was artsy fartsy and I was grinding my teeth pretty much the entire time I was there. There was no light on the stage and the majority of the other photographers there were popping flashes. My camera does not have a built in flash and I don't even think to bring flashes to concerts because they usually aren't allowed. I maxed out all of my settings: highest ISO, lowest f stop, and I pretty much shot hoping my lenses would find something to lock onto. I even tried manually focusing at times. I guess the lesson I learned from this experience, besides the fact that I should ALWAYS research what I'm agreeing to photograph ahead of time, is to roll with it. I still got some decent shots of musicians I wasn't particularly fond of. In my mind, that's the hardest thing to do. I didn't care for it, yet I still managed to capture what was there. That might sound like a simple thing, but it's definitely not.

Anyway, enough rambling. Here are the pictures.
 
Peter Sotos

Pharmakon

Richard Hell

Julianna Barwick

Evian Christ

Pig Destroyer

If you're wondering about my comment in the beginning about there being no light, I need to clarify. There was light during Pig Destroyer's set. There were free standing light tubes surrounding the drummer. I made my way from the front of the stage after the first couple of songs, mostly out of concern for my own safety and the well being of my gear, and attempted some shots from the back of the stage. The good thing is that the lead singer and guitarist turned their backs to the audience so I squeaked out a couple nice shots from this angle.