Last Saturday, the Sounds of the Underground tour rolled into St. Paul and Rick and I weren’t going to miss a minute of it. I’ll leave the show review to Rick as that was his responsibility. I was once again working on my photography skills.
First and foremost, I had a press pass. That let me go right up to the stage and take shots (during the first 3 songs). With my pocket camera, there’s almost no other way to do it. At larger shows like this one, being in the crowd isn’t close enough. Besides that, you get much better photos when you aren’t wrestling the rest of the crowd for space and trying to pay attention to what the band is doing.
This show started at 2 and finished a little after 10. Needless to say, I was stretching battery life on my camera just to make it through and it turns out I didn’t do that well. During Machine Head, the 3rd to last band, I noticed my batt low light flashing. I hurried in a few more shots and quickly turned it off. During the next band, In Flames, I ran into a similar problem (worsened by the fact that I was having problems getting a good shot of Anders, the lead vocalist). By the time As I Lay Dying came out, the battery was virtually cashed. I got in 4-5 blurry shots before it died completely.
I’m sure I could’ve gotten some extra mileage out of the battery if I hadn’t taken so much time to delete bad shots as I got them. I guess this is why they say to take as many shots as possible and edit later. Even though I knew that, I was working with limited resources. With 4 bands left to play, I had about 120 shots left and I was shooting more than 30 shots per band easily. The math just wasn’t going to work out. I guess in the end, the amount of editing I did wasn’t worth missing out on the headlining band of the night. Looking back, I was also a little trigger happy with the opening bands. I could’ve focused more attention to the later artists.
After getting home and seeing my shots, I proudly proclaim they’re my best yet. The shots from Trivium and Machine Head came out the best of all. Thank you Rob Flynn, thank you Matt Heafy (and the rest of Trivium) for the great poses! I’ve posted my shots on Decoymusic and you can expect Rick’s expose shortly.
