March 11, 2009 – There's one band to go, but from the way the floor is heaving and the front row is screaming, you'd never know it. As the UK's Bring Me The Horizon lays down the brutality of breakdowns, death growls, and chugging riffs, the thought occurs that they might not know either.
“Pray for Plagues,” Bring Me The Horizon:
Shooting Notes:
This was one of the performances on the Taste of Chaos Tour that I was most looking forward to photographing, and Bring Me The Horizon did not disappoint.
During the performance my friend Dave said, as if stating the number of days in a week, that BMTH always upstages anyone they play with. Unfortunately for Pierce the Veil and Thursdsay, I think he might have been right.
The lighting for this set was overall darker than that for Pierce the Veil, with deeper washes and a generally heavier feel. Frontlighting was almost completely absent and colored backlighting dominated the band's treatment.
To supplement the stage treatment, I shot this set with a Nikon SB-900 on-camera bounced off the flash's built-in white card, with the unit at roughly a 45º angle. This was the same setup I used for Pierce the Veil, and it wasn't until Thursday's set that I switched to a wireless flash setup.
My exposure for the ambient lighting was between ISO 1600 and 3200 at f/2.8, with a shutter speed hovering around 1/100.
For this performance, I concentrated on singer Oliver Sykes and found that keeping up with the frontman was quite a task in itself. Sykes was prone to erratic movements on stage, but most of his movement was between two clusters of monitors at the front of the stage.
More than anything, the tricky aspect of shooting Sykes was anticipating his lunges forward and down, which provided the best opportunities for close-up shots of the singer.
In tracking him, I stayed with Sykes as much as possible as he went from monitor to monitor at the front of the stage, trying to get into position as he put a foot up on a wedge in anticipation of him leaning in for the real deal
