Highlight: Seeing the lovely Fran Nevrlka, Chairman of PPL - one of the sincerest people at the upper echelons of the Music Business.
Tom McGuiness and Fran Nevrlka
Lowlight: The PPL balloons being knicked within minutes of being put up - give them back who ever it was!
Fill in: PPL is one of the nicest companies to work for in the music business and a lot of it is down to its Chair. Fran Nevrkla is the real deal - passionate, intelligent, eloquent and understated. His influence permeates the company and doing his Christmas Drinks bash at The Avenue is always an oversubscribed affair. It is a long job as nobody ever wants to leave and the crew near enough have to bully the crowd into submission.
Tech Spec: The last few years of this event have been a frantic scramble to be in time for the Music Week deadline, much of which involved me wandering round the party balancing a laptop trying to find an internet signal, getting a small sign of life and taking half an hour to send one highly compressed file whilst still trying to take photos of the party. This year, the deadlines lave been moved - Hurrah - so could relax and enjoy just photographing the party. It's a struggle as it is standing room only and a case of burrowing through the bodies then pumping out one's elbows to get enough room to take a group shot on a very wide angel lens - not flattering but the alternative is to use a cattle prod and Nikon have not brought one out yet - I suppose I could use my monopod...
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Highlight:
The dessert at The Landmark Hotel! Private performances from the cream of new classical talent.
Lowlight: Being called into action just as dessert arrived and said dessert melting into a puddle by the time I got to return to it.
Fill in: This event held by Universal was located in three different venues, with seven artists over two days in three separate time slots. All performances were in very low light and after the Little Noise sessions I'd had enough of magenta light with blue backlight - however it seems to be a trend and the first of the sessions was exactly that - magenta and blue! The performances were extremely quiet and I was restricted to shooting at the beginning and end of each performance so it was quite limiting. But hey, I was being paid to basically hang around, hear great music and eat good food so why complain.
Tech Spec: Just bought the Nikon V1 so I can take pictures without the DSLR mirror clanging all over the place. Unfortunately the adaptor for my lenses is not out yet so it pretty redundant at the moment. Replaced the D300 with the D7000 which is also quieter than the D3 but focusing in the low light proved not so great so I had to settle for the clang of the D3. In St James Church this audible click seems to be amplified several times and made my creeping around unobtrusively pointless as every time I took a picture it was like a a thunderclap. Come on Nikon - get this adaptor out for the V1 asap.
Highlight: Surprise visit from Rhianna and fab new artist Michael Kiwanuka (pictured below). Look out for him.
Lowlight: Yes. The light was low. Except for the strips lights, bare bulbs and reflector dishes blazing right into the lens. It looked great for the acts but was a nightmare to shoot.
Fill in: Private showcases from industry megastar Will I Am, hot band of the moment Florence and the Machine, young new upstarts Minus Behaviour, the new Pavarotti Joseph Calleja, and the afore mentioned Michael Kiwanuka. Amazing voices, amazing dancers and amazing personalities from all genres of the music scene made up the entertainment for this 2 day MD conference with an added bonus as Rhianna waltzed in to say hello in the middle of a presentation. Together with dinner at the Savoy attended by the legendary Jimmy Lovine it was a pretty cool job.
Tech Spec: Never have the light source going straight into the lens if you can help it. Of course if the whole background is made up of light sources of the worst possible kind for photography (led strip lights, tungsten bare bulbs and huge dish reflectors) then you either have to get at an angle where they are not in the background or wait for something to move between the lens and the light source to block it. With Florence it was fairly straight forward to use her to block the dish reflectors and they even added a good back light to her golden shawl and fiery hair. I moved at a sharp angle to the stage for Michael and the bare bulbs separated his hair from the background. Minus Behaviour however moved at 160 beats per minute for the whole set so it was tricky even pinning them down for any kind of shot, let alone one that allowed for the lighting. They had the strips lights and saturated magenta spots from the front and they were wearing black. I managed got some individuals but the group shots were few are far between. Joseph, Will I ma and Jimmy were all shot in the conference rooms so it was just a matter of setting the white balance of the camera to compensate as much as possible for the pink, lilac cast.
