Any time I have the opportunity to watch live music I will consistently watch the drummer. Simply I find they are the most entertaining to watch, however they are the hardest to shoot well making their music.
The part that I love about watching drummers live is that their part of the show is honest, very little of what they are doing is a gimmick or dance, it really is just how cool they look no matter where they play. The part that becomes difficult when shooting is that single moments of a drummer playing often look really strange without seeing the whole show play out before you, as you watch their movement over the duration of a song.

I have a lot of respect for photographers who can capture drummers effectively in a couple frames. Especially for photographers shooting film too. For me I have the ability to check as I shoot to verify i’ve been capturing the ideas and frames I try to shoot. Capturing the split second moments when drummers are in a photogenic position, and have a expression on their face that doesn’t look like they are passing a gall stone is where the skill lies.
Two other points add a level of difficulty to capturing the point in time that you really want: shutter lag is one difficulty to address; although cameras are incredibly fast now, my subject Andrew Higgins is drumming really fast. Secondly my sense of rhythm isn’t very good, I am not a complete failure at it, but not a human metronome by any standards.

I also wanted to experiment with coloured lighting for this shoot. Two photographers who i really respect that use gels a lot: Joe McNally and Eric Seo, and I wanted to give it a try. The space we shot in posed a lot of little difficulties for shooting; mainly space, as well as what it looks like. It was the jam space for the band which really had about 2 feet around the drums on each side, and 4 feet infront the set to work in. The space is also not very pretty looking, although a classy place wasn’t needed its not quite a photogenic ugly space…. if that makes sense to anyone. Coloured lighting for the non-BW shot really made it a picture of interest compared to using un-gelled strobes.

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