Drake Manchester Apollo

Really difficult shoot this with lots of smoke, little light & runaround stage arm waving rapper

Drake is a rapper from canada, seems tickets for last nights show where trading for £150 each with a face value of just £22








Larger size in my flickr link below

Feeling my age as I've never heard of this guy

Love the dark red background in the first one, so much so that I'd even consider cropping those rather nice pink lights at the top.

#2 is a excellent shot for me - the spots provide a great background and he stands out really well.

I agree with Tim.

K.

I agree with Tim too, on both counts

i am working for a new agency now & they need the files to be huge so cropping just isn't allowed! If it was i certainly would have cropped though.

thanks for the comments.

Sorry I should explain why #1 doesn't work for me. His hand is almost totally obscuring his face and there are too many shadows. Obviously I'm in a minority of one though !

hi frogfish, thats ok. the problem with shooting show like this in smaller venues is that they never seem to have front lighting & as flash is not allowed shadows are unfortunately unavoidable in concert photography.

As for not seeing his face rappers always seem to sing upwards and only look down when they swing their whole body down. being down to 1/60 shutter speed it is just impossible to get a sharp shot when this happens.

Blimey...I remember when it was the best venue in town...

Nice shots, I thought...Though I too have never heard of him. Does he make the front of NME ?

I don't think he has even been in the NME yet. I firt saw him at Glastonbury last year in one of the dance tents, but wasn't all that impressed.

The music scene is rapidly changing, working in the music industry I get to know the bands & acts that are going to make it next. Yet in the last few months I have photographed bands that are getting absolutely no airplay or tv coverage what so ever & yet there will be 1000's of fans there who know every word to the songs.

Try these acts for example

Inju5tice
PJ Donnely
Sam Clarke
AJ

Seems AJ is being filmed for a current ITV 2 documentary which is to be screened in March / April time yet up to now he has had zero air play. I can only assume this interest is being raised through facebook & twitter. Like I say the whole music industry is going through this massive invisible change which most of the adult population simply are unaware is even happening...

For those interested next weeks shoot will be 80s rockers The Cult, that one I am rally looking forward to

Yep, you're right, not a clue who they are

I'm sure you're right about facebook and twitter though. Probably throw in some myspace and youtube in there as well.

Now you're talking! I'm looking forward to those!

That's because there basically is no mass TV coverage of music any more. 10 years ago I was doing an average of 3 music shows a week (and sometimes more), all shown at prime times throughout the week from all the broadcasters. Now there's the rotating "talent" (ha ha) shows on saturday nights, no saturday morning kids shows, no family chart shows, and leaving us with just Later with Jules, (which is hardly prime-time or mass-market) and the odd one-off special and other half-hearted efforts which get no real push from the networks.

Radio broadcasts to specific nieches, so nobody ever goes outside their listening comfort zone. Youtube/facebook/myspace are all very well, but again people rarely look at anything they aren't familiar with.


I suspect that could have been written by any middle-aged person any time since the 50's... its always been about what teenagers listen to, and that's rarely what their parents like!