Heavy Music Awards Nomination

On Monday the 20th of January 2020 I woke up after a long night of traveling home, from London after photographing a band I love, to an email I thought I’d honestly never get.

I was nominated as one of the Heavy Music Awards Young Photographer Of The Year Awards. This has been one of my goals for the past 3 years as I’ve entered each year since I started university but never got through until now.

I’m alongside 5 other fantastic photographers, some of which I’ve looked up for a while and others who are new discoveries for me. I always draw inspiration from fellow photographers so the competition has given me more connections within my work.

I have just under 2 weeks to pull in as many votes as possible, and the prize if I win is a studio session mentored by the legendary Paul Harries, who is the Kerrang! photographer and one of my biggest inspirations to this day.

Knowing that Paul actually looked at my photograph and thought it was good enough to make it to the final 6 photographs is an honour within itself. The photo that was chosen is CJ (Dreamstate) performing at Burn It Down Festival in Torquay last year. It was my highlight of the year as during the festival I suffered an injury to my wrist during a heavy band, so when I came to the front to photograph Dreamstate they actually pulled me to the stage to shoot their set as they say the injury and didn’t want me in the crowd, so their kindness made this shot possible and I’m forever grateful to be able to work with such amazing bands like Dreamstate.

I’m truly blown away with the response I’ve had via social media since the nomination was announced, feeling the love for sure!

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If you’d like to take a moment out of your day to vote for me (no sign up required) you can do so below.

Link To Vote For Me

Thank you for your support throughout this experience, good luck to everyone who’s been nominated and I can’t wait for the event in London in May this year.

Here’s to 2020

Griever Live Gallery @ Cavern Club, Exeter

I was sent to photograph a metalcore band called Griever on behalf of RAMzine magazine at their gig in Exeter. As my live review is being posted over on their website, I though I’d take the time to share a few of my favourite images from the gig and a few photos from the promo shoot I organised before the show.

Above are the live images of Griever, which I edited in a slightly different way to what I usually do. For the black and white images I used much darker tones within them, the shadows and blacks are a low lower to create that dark moody look.

The band were inspired by Loathe and Lotus Eaters style of photography for the coloured images. They asked me to focus the colours around a blue palette, so thats what I did. I used Lightrooms white balance to create a cold blue tone to the photos and experimented with the split toning mode a little when a bit extra blue was needed.

I am immensely proud of the promo images above. I used a speedlight attached to a boom arm to create the lighting, which has just made the photos what they are. If the lighting was straight on the photos wouldn’t have been as good as they are.

The band have the perfect gothic, grunge look to suit the location. The harsh textures in the wall and the grittiness of the background suit the style of the guys perfectly.

Griever are going on tour this October, so I’d suggest you go and check them out if they play near you as they’ve some truly fantastic guys and a brilliant band.

Top 5 bands at Burn It Down Festival 2019

I was asked back to photograph the second instalment of Burn It Down Festival in Torquay. Last years event Was brilliant. I got the chance to photograph bands like Mallory Knox, Dream State and Arcane Roots.

The line-up this year had some fantastic bands like Basement, Loathe, Haggard Cat, Black Peaks, Dream State loads of which I’ve had the pleasure of photographing before and a few new bands for me to photograph.

The event had three stages across three venues. The Signature Stage which was at The Apple & Parrot. The The main stage was the Jägermeister Stage which was at The Foundry.

I photographed over 15 bands over the day, varying from rock to hardcore to emo.

My top 5 favourite bands at Burn It Down are -

  • Black Peaks

  • Dream State

  • Mother Vulture

  • Haggard Cat

  • RXPTRS

After what can only be described as a highly successful second year for the South West festival, I am really looking forward to seeing what this festival had in store for the coming years.

Photographing Coheed & Cambria at ArcTanGent 2019

For the second year running I had the privilege of attending ArcTanGent festival. Looking at the stacked line-up, I knew this year would be a good one at that. Headlining the Arc stage (main stage for those who don’t know) on the first night were the mighty Coheed and Cambria.

Claudio Sanchez opening the show

As a long time fan of the band I was extremely excited to be able to photograph them as the band are on my bucket list of bands to photograph. The set had some insane lighting which I was able to utilise to the best of my abilities to get some pretty unique imagery. The stage lighting created some gorgeous silhouettes and shadows in the 3 images below.

For the images above I decided to edit them in such a way to highlight the intense silhouettes the stage lighting created. I used a mixture of self made presets on Lightroom to create a moodier look to the images but still keeping the colours bright in the coloured images, keeping the highlights bright in the black and white image.

As you can see in the photo above Claudio Sanchez was giving it his all during the performance. It’s one of the best things about being a live music photographer when you’re able to photograph a musician who’s passion comes through your lens, emotion like this just makes for better images and helps to tell more of a story.

For all the images on this post I used my Canon 5D Mark iii with either my 24-70mm 2.8 lens or my 70-200mm 2.8 lens. The low aperture enabled me to capture the colours well as it let in all the available light during the show. During post I kept the vibrancy bumped up to really saturate the colours in the images above as I didn’t want to lose any of them during editing. I always aim for my photos to look as true to the actual show as possible.

My favourite photo of the bands set

I wanted to get an image to highlight Claudios hair and show movement during their set. The photo above does both of these things. The highlights draw attention to his hair and the high shutter speed has captured the movement and kept the image sharp. The photo above is easily my favourite of their entire set as I love the attention to detail within it. The photo is minimal in its appearance but still keeps a high level of sharpness and detail when you really look into it. This images makes me super proud.