I was given another opportunity to take concert photos for one of my more recent favorite bands, The Joy Formidable. I've had three of their songs end up in my Top 3 Songs posts, and their new album, Wolf's Law, is my favorite of the year so far. They headlined a show at The Neptune Theatre with Fort Lean and Guards opening for them.
I have not been to The Neptune since it was converted into an event venue. The last movie I saw there was There Will Be Blood. Judging from the pictures I found online, it didn't look like there would be a photo pit at this show. But wouldn't you know it... I walked up past the crowd and saw a very thin photo pit available. I was super excited! Concert photography is hard enough that shooting from the audience would not be very fun.
Overall, this concert was much more difficult to photograph than the Anberlin one. The main reason was the lighting. It wasn't too bad for Fort Lean, but Guards loved the dark and blue, as well as this little sparkly light thing that revolved on the stage. The Joy Formidable's lights were everywhere, but mostly right at me and my lens! Yikes! Still, I think I made the best of it and I'm pretty happy with how the pics turned out.
The concert itself was awesome. If you ever have a chance to catch The Joy Formidable live, they are worth it. Very energetic and fun. The lead singer and guitarist, Ritsy Bryan, is adorable and incredibly entertaining to watch. She makes a lot of faces at the crowd and widens her eyes a lot. As if almost to say, "Yeah, I rock this hard." At the end, she was standing on the drum set, banging a giant gong with the tip of the neck of the guitar. Crazy! They played all of my favorite songs, and then some.
I was able to connect with a couple of the other concert photographers there. One said he shoots for The Tacoma-Seattle News Tribune and the other said he works for Seattle Music Insider. I found that they were very kind and easy to talk to. It's certainly not hard to build strong relationships and a solid foundation in this industry. However, concert photography is not a thing I want to get into regularly. It's just a small challenging aspect of one of my favorite hobbies, so I don't really plan on taking it much further than this, but if I wanted to, it wouldn't be a struggle.
I still hope to do it again sometime as the rush of trying to get great shots, as well as being mere inches away from some seriously talented musicians is just the kind of thing I live for. Again, if your popular band is planning on coming through Seattle for a concert and you like my style of photography, feel free to contact me.
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