James at the Cardiff Motorpoint Arena 2021

As should be obvious from some of the posts in this blog, we love live music and particularly love the opportunity to photograph it.

The band James have been one of my favorite bands since I can’t even remember, but I do know that I fell back in love with their music following the release of their “Hey Ma” album after they reformed in 2007…since that time I firmly believe they have just got better with each release, so it was a given that when they announced they were touring, we bought a pair of tickets. We actually went the extra mile and bought VIP tickets, which allowed us to see them rehearsing 3 songs before the main gig, with a tiny number of others.
They’re very giving to their audience, and so we were treated to 3 songs, the chance to get up close, ask questions and early entry to the main gig so we could be right at the front. I’d highly recommend this if you get the option with a band you love.

The Allergies at The Garage in London

Wow! Wow! Wow! Who knew by taking a few random snaps at a gig in Bristol would lead us to travel up to London the same week and take some pics for the amazing group ‘The Allergies’!

If you haven’t heard these guys then you must…as quoted by Craig Charles himself ‘The Allergies are neck deep in the world of scratchy samples -This is truly funk and soul for the 21st century’.

So anyway, how did we get here you may ask, well…The Allergies basically liked my photos from a previous gig (hashtaging really does help!) and next minute we were hopping on the train London bound heading towards The Garage. Both Woz and I absolutely love music in a huge way (it helps the soul, right?), and other than our wedding photography business going fairly quiet over the series of lockdowns, we have really missed live music at gigs and festivals. Unfortunately we contracted Covid over the summer (even though we are both double jabbed) which meant we couldn’t attend the Beautiful Days festival which we had been gearing up for. But hey, some things are slowly getting back to some normality now and so we jumped back deep into going to gigs.

The Allergies are a duo of skilled turntablists from Bristol who formed back in 2012 and along their way they have incorporated the mighty sounds of rapper Andy Cooper, soul sensation Marietta Smith and saxophonist extraordinaire Mr Woodnote. Together they make an incredible team and their performances are nothing but sublime.

Fuji!

For a long time now, we've been using a range of cameras from a couple of camera systems for our wedding photography - we have used the canon 5DIII, the canon 7D and a pair of Olympus OMDs. We've got quite an extensive range of lenses for both systems...we used the same collection of kit for our event and gig photography too  

 At the end of last year, we decided that in order to make our workflow a little easier we'd move to a single manufacturer and have matching cameras. Well, it's not quite worked out like that, as I'm very attached to my OMDs and Em still loves her very well worn canon.

 But, we do have a pair of spanking new Fujifilm X-H1s that are now our main bodies for all our weddings.

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We picked Fuji because their cameras create beautiful images in both colour and mono, while having an extremely well designed interface with all the settings you need immediately available on the camera. It's great to see all the settings immediately without having to delve through menus. 

It helps that the cameras are very handsome to look at and have a classic analogue look to them. 

We're also very impressed with their lens line-up, which caters to professionals with their xf range, and the set we have are the XF WR R - Fuji love their letters!

The XF range are their premium lenses, the WR stands for water resistant and the R means that the lens has an aperture ring on it. When the lenses are on our X-H1 cameras, you can actually run them under a tap! We've not tried this...

We've been using the system a couple of months now and we're very impressed. We're especially impressed with the quality of the images we're getting.

Things we love about them:

They are quiet. We didn’t realise just how quiet until we shot a wedding with them this month. I’ve previously favoured my Olympus kit during the ceremony as they are much quieter than a traditional SLR but the X-H1 has been designed with a damped shutter mechanism that makes them almost completely unobtrusive while still having a satisfying noise that tells you you’ve taken a picture. 

They can shoot in very low light. We shoot in a documentary style, sometimes resorting to flash for the dancing, to add a little excitement to the images.  

They’re pretty!

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This shot of Frank Turner was taken at the cavern in Exeter last week. The venue is very small with a capacity of about 200, it was dark and crowded with hot spots in the lighting.

We are currently processing the shots from our latest wedding and will post samples when we can.