Funkstylerz @ Oceana, Plymouth

Got back yesterday from Plymouth where Funkstylerz were performing at Oceana for Orange as part of their Christmas celebrations. They've been performing all around the country at various venues for the mobile phone company.

East 17

Been working with East 17 recently on their comeback. We'll be doing some promo shoots over the next few months amongst other things.

Last night I went along to one of their gigs to capture some much needed live images for them to use as publicity.

Funkstylerz @ Donny

Spent the weekend with the Funkstylerz at Doncaster Car Show capturing their performances. They were performing on the Monster stage and had also brought with them, Decibella (who I had previously shot for their website), PeteBox, and some football freestylers.

Urban Strides : Shake The Room

Urban Strides were performing in Basingstoke in Shake The Room, a platform for youth entertainers. The venue was a small intimate theatre which gave a very different feel to the previous arena tour venues.

The greatest challenge I faced this time around was my positioning. During the technical rehearsal I had free reign to run about in front of the stage. However, because the stage was fairly low, I couldn't do this during the actual performance as I would have created an obstruction for the audience. This meant I had to shoot from the wings at the side of the stage. Initially I thought this may have given me real problems with the theatre using large amounts of smoke, but I managed to get a few good shots.

Urban Strides @ Move It 08

Just spent the weekend at Olympia in London with Urban Strides for the 2008 Move It Exhibition. Had an awesome time and got some good shots! Here's a few...

Urban Strides Arena Tour 2007

One of the areas of photography I specialise in shooting is dance, and just before Christmas, I was very privileged to be able to go on tour with a client of mine, Urban Strides.

Urban Strides are a youth Hip Hop dance troupe and were performing as part of the "Young Voices Concerts" at arenas all over the country in front of crowds up to 20000 people!

Shooting the performances threw up a few photographic challenges. It was a low light situation that demanded fast shutter speeds in order to capture the movement. Flash wasn't possible because there was smoke on the stage which would have reflected the light back similar to driving in fog at night. I ended up shooting at iso1600 using my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. This enabled me to shoot in shutter priority at 1/200sec, which was just fast enough to freeze people enough, but still have a tiny amount of blur around hands to indicate movement.



 
 

If  you would like to see the performance in full, check out the video below. If you look closely you can see me taking some of the shots above!



A personal highlight from the trip was during one of the finales. The show finale consisted of all the performers from the night wearing santas hats and dancing like idiots to the sound of Christmas songs. Well at the Manchester Evening News Arena I had a santas hat put on me and was told to take photos from the stage amongst everyone else. So there I am, dancing like an idiot like everyone else whilst taking photos, on stage in front of 20000 people! Not something I imagine many people get to do!