Julian Baird 20/09/2015 Julian Baird 20/09/2015

In The Garden

In The Garden had all the elements of an epic night. A great Exeter city centre location, nice weather (for September), a quality line up of artists and 4500 tickets sold. So when I was asked by Hold It Down to cover Exeter's biggest ever music festival with MusicMuso I didn't need to be asked twice!

As usual on The Unplugged Blog I'm going to let my images do the talking and I'll leave my friends over at MusicMuso to wax lyrical about the event (a full review will be on their website really soon). But one thing I can say is that the packed out crowd had an awesome night and were treated to some of the UKs finest musical talent.

Here, let me show you...

As you can see it was a bit of an epic night and it was a lot of fun to shoot. It's always good fun at the festivals as you get to photograph artists on a big stage and the crowd enjoying themselves.

Well, that's about it from me. Keep an eye out on my Twitter feed and this blog for a very special post that I'll be making this week. I'm also shooting the Bluetones this Sunday night in Bristol, so you can see some images from that gig both on my Twitter feed and here on the blog.

On a technical note....

As regular readers will know I like to tweet images live from the gig to my Twitter feed. I had some real issues with this on Saturday night though. In certain locations around the In The Garden event my tablet struggled to maintain its WiFi connection to my camera. As you can imagine this made tweeting images rather difficult! I'm not sure what the issue was as my workflow is normally rock solid in the field (including other festivals). It could have been the density of people (and mobile phones), or the radio transmitters that had been installed. I'm not sure which it was, but something I'll need to be aware of for next time!

See you next time...

Julian Baird 10/11/2014 Julian Baird 10/11/2014

The Boomtown Rats

Some nights you leave a gig with the wonderful feeling that you got some great shots and you heard some fantastic music. Last night at the Lemon Grove was definitely one of those nights!

As always on The Unplugged Blog, I'm going to share a few of my favourite images hot from the editing desk. Normally I'd only share one image from each artist but I have so many great images you all deserve to see two!

First up was the exceptionally talented and lovely Polly Money.

I was lucky enough to grab a quick chat with Polly back stage with Steve from MusicMuso so expect to hear more about Polly on the MusicMuso website really soon.

Next up were Exeter's top steam punk band The Mysterious Freakshow. They were colourful, loud and energetic. Definitely a band I will keep an eye out for on the local gig scene.

The main act of the night was of course The Boomtown Rats, and from the moment that Sir Bob bounded on to the stage the place erupted. Now, there is a man that can work the crowd. I really love shooting a band that can work the crowd. There is always so much to shoot!

For those of you that follow my Twitter account you know that I like to live tweet images straight from venue (thanks to Nikon D750, a Nexus tablet, and a phone signal). I tweeted this image last night but just had stick it on my blog as well. I just loved the way he played up to the camera for me. He got a big thumbs up back from me!

And now the star of the show, Bob Geldof, or as I now think of him, rock God!

It was a real pleasure shooting all three acts last night. I've still got a whole stack of images to get through and edit, but I just wanted to share these with you right now! Expect a full write up of the gig really soon over at MusicMuso.

In the meantime I'm going to carry on listening to new Pink Floyd album and I'll see you next time on The Unplugged Blog!