Ferocious Dog and Sam Green & The Midnight Heist at Exeter Phoenix - 14/04/2017
What's not to love about a Friday night? For most people, it's the end of the working week and chance to unwind. If you were lucky enough to be at the Exeter Phoenix last Friday night your evening would have been made even better with some live music courtesy of Sam Green & The Midnight Heist and Ferocious Dog.
On paper, this was destined to be a great night of music so when my friends over at MusicMuso asked me to photograph the gig there was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to cover this one. Having photographed Ferocious Dog previously I was confident that the huge levels of energy that these guys deliver on stage will make for a great night of photography. So I passed on my Friday night glass of wine, grabbed my camera and headed eagerly off to the Exeter Phoenix.
MusicMuso will be posting up a full review of the gig shortly, so as usual here on The Unplugged Blog, I'm going show you some of my best images from this awesome gig.
Sam Green & The Midnight Heist
Ferocious Dog
Shooting Challenges
Photographing live music is rarely without its challenges and Friday night was no different. For those of you who have had the pleasure of seeing Ferocious Dog before will know that their gigs can be a little "lively". The band have some quality fans who love nothing better than to have a good mosh and jump about. It's great to witness and really adds to the atmosphere of the gig.
My challenge for this gig was finding a good spot to shoot from. Normally there would be a pit so I could freely move up and down the length of the stage, but in this instance, I wasn't going to have that luxury. So, to get the photos I was going to have to get in there with the crowd. I would need to pick my spot carefully though. Too far off to the side the photos would be dull, but to close to the middle and it would be unlikely that I would be able to keep still enough against the surging crowd to take pictures.
Fortunately, I did manage to find a spot that would allow me to capture some good images. I wasn't able to move sideways so I could adjust my composition, and I did get wet from some flying booze, but I did seem to pick just the right location as I was able to use the camera without getting jostled too much. Obviously I would have liked a pit area, but some of the fun of live music photography is working through the challenges!
So that's it for me this week. In my next blog post I will be covering Record Store Day, so be sure visit The Unplugged Blog again to see the images from this cracking national event. If you want to know exactly when that blog post goes up be sure to follow me on my Facebook page, Instagram feed, and Twitter feed.