2008 Blog and Journals

Last November I spent a day with Funeral For A Friend, photographing the band behind-the-scenes exclusively for their online sites.  The photos went up last week on Funeral For A Friend's official flickr and I've just posted a small selection right here on Buzznet.

As a young, fairly unknown music photographer, being able to shoot anything other than just the first three songs of a gig is pretty amazing.  Luckily the guys in Funeral For A Friend have their own record label so can call all the shots and if an idea takes their fancy, they can run with it.  On this occasion I proposed to do a behind-the-scenes documentary on one of their UK tour dates, a kind of day-in-the-life type thing.  For some reason you rarely see these kind of photo-stories anymore, perhaps because they're not flashy and high-gloss, but photographers used to do them in the 70's for bands like The Rolling Stones and I've always found them fascinating.

In the photos there's a vague timeline from meeting the band in their dressing room around midday and hanging out for a couple of hours, heading to a signing at a record/clothes shop and then the gig itself in the evening.  One day I'd love to extend this to an entire tour so if you know a band with a spare bunk on their bus for a photographer, let me know :)

Oh and for the photography geeks out there, I shot the entire day using a Nikon FM2 SLR camera with a 50mm F1.8 lens and lots of black and white film which had to be pushed from 1600iso to 6400iso!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the photos so drop them in a note or a comment, which shot is your favourite?


Justine