David Emery Online

Twin Shadow 4AD Session

More photos here and watch the session here.

Yahoo!locaust

Does anyone have any good recommendations for a Flickr alternative?

Getting seriously tempted to attempt making one myself (although that would obviously be a ridiculous folly) as there seems to be no service actually aimed at photographers (rather then just people that take photos) that competes with it.

Fujifilm unveils FinePix X100 large-sensor compact

This has gone straight to the top of my wish list. All I can hope is that it doesn’t have a Leica-style price tag to go with its Leica-style looks.

House Season Finale Filmed Entirely with Canon 5D Mark II

Very interesting – what with the occurrence of RED One video cameras being used to shoot magazine covers, these two once separate industries seem to be converging pretty quickly.

I do love the look you get shooting video with a DSLR (not that I have any interest doing it myself – it’s all about the stills for me).

Zoom With Your Feet

“3 songs, no flash.”

It’s the standard – and also mildly disappointing – phrase you hear more times then not when you pickup your photopass before a gig. I ‘get’ why it’s done – I know if I was a band I’d want fans in front of me rather then photographers, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. If you don’t know the venue there’s always that hope that maybe they don’t have a strict policy, although chances are that if they don’t have limits then they probably don’t have a photo pit either which brings its own set of challenges (mostly surrounding the fact that you’re pretty much rooted to the spot).

I know, I know – never happy, always complaining.

The lack of flash is normally ok – I’ll use flash if I can, but only to boost up the light that’s there already; pretty much all of my favourite photos I’ve taken are made interesting by the stage lights. That being said, every now and then you come across a gig where the lighting guy decides not to put the front lights on and you’re pretty much screwed (see Julian Casablancas at the Forum where I only...

Sche-dual

I find it slightly amusing that several marketing departments around the world decided that, purely because of the aesthetically pleasing date, today was the day to announce and/or sell new things. Which of course possibly made today the worst day to announce anything without getting lost in all the noise, although maybe if you had techie news that needed burying that might be quite useful…

First dibs of course went The Beatles, who somehow managed to coax some more interest over selling some albums that everyone already has. Oh, and a videogame. Big whoop. I have nothing against the Beatles; in fact, they probably have the best back catalogue out of pretty much anyone but I know that because I already have the albums already.

Of course, potentially of more interest is the now annual Apple ‘stuff we want you to buy at christmas’ event. This always used to focus heavily on iPods but since the iPhone came along and made that party look pedestrian the September event seems to be sliding in a more ‘software’ direction.

By ‘software’ I of course mean ‘iTunes’, and this year round we got a fairly substantial update. I can’t quite be arsed (‘This word cannot be...

Leica M9 and X1 leak out ahead of schedule

We’re told the M9 will sport a full-frame 18.2 megapixel sensor and improved low-light performance, but the real surprise is the X1, pictured above, which’ll supposedly have a 12 megapixel APS-C sensor, a fixed 24mm lens and that funky grip handle, by which we’re oddly fascinated.

The X1 sounds really interesting – a decent sized sensor, auto focus and a nice fixed lens sounds perfect to me. The M9, with a full frame sensor and hence hopefully low noise, is what I will lust for until they bring out a M10 – I will forever want a digital Leica…

Greatness Happening Somewhere

Is it them or is it me?

That’s the question I asked myself during The National show at Royal Festival Hall on Monday. The aforementioned ‘them’ is not the band, but the rest of the audience, who were having a great time.

I was not.

Now, that’s not to say that the band weren’t good, or put on a bad show or anything like that because they didn’t – they were on great form, played pretty much all the songs I was after and generally ticked all the boxes (including the ‘witty banter’ box). But it just didn’t ‘click’ and there’s only one reason for that: the venue.

Royal Festival Hall is, of course, a stunning place with amazing acoustics but the key problem for me was the seats – surprisingly enough, I’ve never actually been to a seated gig before (short of a couple of shows in assorted churches, but that’s different), and boy does it suck. I’ve avoided them like the plague previously because I like nothing more then getting down the front at a gig, getting as close as possible and getting a real connection with not only the performers, but also the fans that are into it – and ‘connected’...

Blur - T in the Park 2009 by Danny North

I heard the bands security telling all the togs he was going to run in to the crowd 2nd song, so I set the fisheye to manual focus, focused on infinity (everything in focus from 2.5 feet) and gauged an approximate exposure – which ended up being bang on…

Not only is this a great photo (although I’m not a massive fan of the fisheye look), but click through and have a read of the description of how he took it – inspiring stuff. Must work on that manual focus lark…

Photo by Danny North

But of course I would say that

It had been a while since the last gig I went to – which was the sublime Pixies gig almost a month ago – so it was nice to get back into the swing of things and head down to the ICA to see the awesome pairing of St Vincent and Blue Roses.

Every now and then I feel it’s probably worth bringing up, in the interests of full disclosure, my inherent biases when it comes to this sort of thing. Both St Vincent and Blue Roses are on labels that I work for, and not only that but I project managed the building of their websites so obviously I have a vested interest and probably can’t be trusted in the slightest to give a unbiased opinion.

Having said that, we probably have about 100+ acts on our active roster and you don’t see me talking about all of them on here, so make of that what you will. While I like to think that I only write about things I genuinely like what I will readily admit is that I do get exposed to a hell of a lot of music that I wouldn’t normally listen to,...