Photographing a live concert with the Leica Akademie

I recently had the pleasure of photographing the ARC live in concert at the Sydney State Theatre with Maclay Heriot and the Leica Akademie. Before we get into the details, I would like to disclose that I was invited to assist with running the workshop by Leica Akademie Australia, which I gladly took part in, however, this blog post is for my own personal storytelling, and I have not been paid to write this. Leica Camera had no input on the post, and are not seeing it prior to release. Now onto the post:

It all started at Leica Store and Gallery Sydney:

To start with, Maclay ran the event excellently. He is a really down to earth person, who was very approachable when Akademie students had questions. Everyone met at 3PM, where we were introduced to Maclay’s work, and got a bit of an understanding for how he gets the shot. We then got to meet Darren Middleton from ‘Powderfinger’, who was playing that night as part of the ARC, and is also another very friendly gentleman, with some excellent photos to share.

One really helpful thing that Maclay and Leica arranged was a tour of the concert venue before everything had been set up. This meant that people like me, who had never tried photographing a live concert before could get used to the space, and understand the rules of engagement before things got started.

After touring the venue, we all went to have dinner and some drinks at a nearby bar while we waited for the concert to start. It was sold out, so the venue got rather crowded, but it was a lovely area, and definetely a place worth checking out if anything exciting comes up.

The ARC (Australian Rock Collective) consists of Kram (Spiderbait), Darren Middleton (Powderfinger), Davey Lane (You am I), and Mark Wilson (Jet). For the concert itself, the ARC was performing Led Zeppelin IV, which contains some of my favourite childhood songs like ‘Stairway to heaven’. I was particularly intrigued by some of the musical instruments used throughout the show, including a mandolin by Davey Lane, or when Darren Middleton brought out a harmonica for ‘When the Levee breaks’. Towards the end, Kram’s daughter came out with a cello to play Kashmir as well. Darren even used the bow after to play the Guitar!

In terms of the photos I took, I’ll put a gallery toward the end, but you’ll notice most of the shots are in monochrome. The lighting for the concert was very much focused on audience enjoyment, rather than good photos, so the colours and lighting just didn’t match the feel I was going for most of the time. There were a few you’ll see in colour, such as the harmonica shot of Darren, but I mostly just liked playing with the shadows. One of my favourite shots was right after they played Kashmir, where Kram gave his daughter a big hug after an excellent cello performance. It was a beautiful, emotional moment for them.

Overall, it was a great experience for me, and something I would definitely recommend to anyone into music photography, or just music and photography.

Finally, I will leave you with a gallery of some of my favourite shots from the night, along with a link below that to some of my recent instagram content in case you are interested: