Calerway, The Paddo

Quick pic spam to catch up on the last few weeks. Was kept busy with new bands & old bands, and big venues & small ones.

-MORE UNDER THE CUT-

The second pants-wettingly good tour of the year has been announced. The Stereophonics are touring their ‘Pull The Pin’ album in April/May, meaning I get to see Matchbox Twenty and The Stereophonics in the same month. Matchbox Twenty have been one of my favourite bands since I was about 15, but I’d missed them for some reason each time they’d toured, so I wasn’t going to miss them this time. I’m shooting it, as far as I know, but I still bought a ticket so I could bask in 3rd-row glory and carry on with my friends like we were teenagers again. I saw the Stereophonics on their last tour in 2005, they’re one of my top 3 favourite bands of all time, and I’d probably rate that concert as one of my favourites ever. When you’ve got so much emotional investment in the songs, nothing beats standing in the middle of a crowd of like-minded people, singing til you go hoarse.

I was ‘pre-publication’ at the time, so had to shoot from the crowd with my little Olympus C-740 (read the review to see what I was up against). Security were being REALLY tough on cameras, so I only had tiny windows in which to take a few quick shots. A majority of them were taken at ISO400, 1/10 from memory.

The results ended up a little bit like THIS and THIS. Not bad, considering, but I’m positively itching to be let loose on them with ‘real’ gear.