MGMT live in Dublin @ the Olympia

This post is being written after 2 in the morning, but I’m going to refer to what happened in this post as ‘tonight’ not yesterday.. In my book, different days are seperated by sleep and I haven’t had mine yet. So, now that that’s cleared up, on with the post.

‘Tonight’ I shot my second gig for MCD. After the craziness which was Guns ‘n Roses at the Odyssey a couple of weeks back where everything was planned to a tee and us photographers got led into and out of the arena in one fail swoop with precision timing, tonights affair in the Olympia was a much more casual affair because once I’d picked up my pass I got the simple instruction “first 3 songs, no flash – take a left at the end of the hallway and left again to get into the pit.” Nice and simple.

The pit is that little bit of space between the stage and the crowd. It’s a nice little walkway where you can put your bag down and have a bit of freedom to move around. I was really relishing this opportunity because at GnR two weeks ago I had to shoot from about 100 yards back at the mixing desk. So being right up front was going to be great! As soon as MGMT arrived on stage though I soon realised that shooting from that close has it’s own problems. For one, the band were mainly backlit so from the front they where pretty dark, if there are any budding photographers out there, you’ll know that trying to focus on something that is dark is quite tricky, something that’s dark and moving is worse and then add spotlights flooding light into your lens into the bargain. So the first song flew by with me thinking to myself “Oh dear.. this is gonna be trickier than I thought..”. After a lot of experimenting with shutter speeds, ISO’s and apertures I finally figured it and got a few, what I’d hope are fairly decent shots.

So then.. enough waffle.

To see these shots nice and large and a bunch more click on any of them or here.

Thanks again to MCD for allowing me to come along!