Frank Turner

Frank Turner - Northumbria Student's Union - Monday 15th March 2010

Another day, another blog from the backlog I have created over the last 2 months. Frank Turner was a show I was really looking forward to, after hearing his most recent album I became a big fan and was looking forward to seeing him. Support for this tour came from Crazy Arm & the great Chuck Reagan, Chuck was/is the singer of one of my favorite bands - Hot Water Music. There is something super special about his voice that I really love so I knew this was going to be a great gig regardless.

For Crazy Arm & Chuck Reagan the lighting was static with just reds lighting up the subjects on stage which is the worst colour of lighting a photographer can be faced with. The red ruins any sort of auto white balance your camera may try to be doing, saturation of the images go's through the roof and cause of this you loose all details of the subject. There is only one real option to save shots like this and that is either to lower saturation down to 20-30% or just stick the images in Black & White. I'm really not a fan of Black & White for live music shots, I feel it is just cheating and is always a last resort for me. (For the record, I'm not saying I hate all Black & White it works great in portraiture and other situations I just feels it takes the edge off the live music shots) So after trawling through all the shots of the support bands in the hope that I may find some shots that I class as usable I gave up and decided that there was no hope for the red lit images. Shame really but hopefully I will get another chance to shoot Chuck in better light.

So moving on to Mr Turner - I was in hope that the guy behind the light desk would wake up and earn his money for this show but actually doing something different with the lighting. All my dreams became true when Frank came on stage and BOOM, up went the lighting.  He really did wake up as the lighting for Frank Turner was the most epic i have seen in this venue. Lights coming from all angles and enough light from the front/sides lighting the subject, meaning I was able to shoot on ISO 500-640 most of the set which is a music photographers dream!

After the first song Frank announced that the night before he was in Chicago, IL and has flown straight over to England for this show with no sleep, but despite this he put on a really powerful and passionate performance. It can sometimes get boring photographing a 'solo' artist and/or backing band but the passion in Frank's music really shows when he is performing so he was a great subject to shoot. Next time he is back in Newcastle I really hope to catch him again!

Check out more pictures from this show below - let me know what you think!

All images strictly © Daniel Hase

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