All things Wayward Sons

Firstly I need to clarify which Wayward Sons band I am writing and discussing here. The band is the Wayward Sons band formed by former Little Angels vocalist Toby Jepson and not the American band of the same name. If you would like to see what they are all officially about then head over to Wayward Sons Official Website or their Facebook page at Wayward Sons Uk Facebook. If you like the look of all that then you can always become a member of the Wayward Fans official Facebook page too. There’s certainly lot’s going on around these guys with a very positive buzz from the critics.

My connection with the band started in 2013 when Toby was gracious enough to let me shoot a couple of his tour dates, namely the O2 at Sheffield and Hull Fruit dates. This assisted me greatly with my BA(Hons), when certain teaching elements said it couldn’t be done and I am eternally grateful for Toby’s assistance. Recently he moved back from the solo work to forming a the new said band. This has produced an album, “Ghosts of yet to come”, which is to be released on 15th September 2017. The band decided on a quadrilogy of video’s, to support four singles from the album, for which they decided to use fans and acquaintances as extras. A general request was sent out to which I replied and waited. A couple of emails later and I’m booked to attend the video shoot in Leicester.

Check out the bands video’s –

“Until The end” – Watch here

“Alive” – Watch here

“Crush” –Watch here

“Ghost” Watch here

As part of my BA I had produced a photobook of images from the dates, which I wished for Toby to sign one day. The video shoot was the perfect opportunity, to get it signed, so the book came with me. At the end of the day the book was signed and I asked who would be covering the first live gig a few weeks later. Toby essentially said he hadn’t thought about that and so I jumped on the opportunity and sold myself, to which he accepted.

The 26th July 2017 was the first live date the band were to perform live together. With a four hour drive to get down to Bristol it was an early start to get there when the band did. The gig was to be held at The Louisiana in Bristol. Even with some internet searching I wasn’t able to find much information on the size of room, lighting, stage or basically anything. To say the least images of the place were rather thin in the google searches and this started to fill me with dread. I knew the room had a capacity of 120 so this was going to be small, intimate and a bugger to shoot properly.

My reservations about the room were indeed justified upon arrival. A small rectangle of a room, box stage at one end, mixing desk at the other and to my horror barely half a dozen of the new LED stage lights to illuminate things for me. These lights are a pain for the cameras. Colours yes but those precious lumens lighting the stage where just not in attendance. With dozens of them yes you can quite confidently shoot away but this was going to be hard, very hard.

The room taken on my iPhone upon arrival.

Now you can see what I mean by intimate. Even the mixing desk is situated in what was a small function room bar to the rear. The daylight is from a balcony fire exit which was opened for some fresh air.

I had a couple of hours to see what suited my cameras and lenses best and it quickly became apparent this was indeed not going to be easy. Low speed, wide open and huge ISO’s just to capture the guy’s setting up were not a good start. A few hours later and we where ready to go. I left the band in the dressing room having taken a group image of them all and made my way to the room. It was almost pitch black, other than those lumen free diet LED lighting units at the stage. They didn’t even face the band as situated on the sides of the stage.

I made my way to the stage, sat on it, placed down my two 5Diii’s armed with grips and 24-70mm f/2.8 / 70-200 f/2.8 lenses respectively and felt the intense wall of heat hit me. I, as was everyone in the room, sweating when things began to roll.

A large roar of approval, and introduction from the DJ, the band step on stage and Boom we are go……..

Wide open at f2.8 the ISO’s where on the limit at 12,500 regardless of 100th sec or 250th sec shutter speeds. The bands front three just never stood still either, which just made things worse. Undeterred I simply wet for it with the 24-70mm wide and 70-200 zooms I had to hand. Being literally sat on the stage I was unable to fit the whole band into any single image. I looked back and saw a young lady shooting away with a DSLR whilst being jostled with the crowd moving. I decided that was not an option so I made the decision to go intimate. I knew there would be 100’s of phone images as upon looking back I could see them all glowing away.

Close up and intimate still gave me a challenge, though I began to like what I saw when quick reviewing the images between bursts. The set was short and before I knew it we were on the last song of the night. For this I made my way to the back of the room and shot over the crowd. Being unable to direct the crowd and band to my vantage point the camera was firmly to my face and finger on the trigger for any opportunity that arose in those last minutes. I grabbed a few and was pleased with the overall results.

Post gig the band made their way downstairs, to the bar area, and mingled with the fans. I took a small selection of fan pics with individual members of the band and then made my way home, arriving back at the ungodly hour of 4am.

So the images taken and how did they turn out? Well to be honest I was actually pleased with a good 75% of what I took. From almost individual portraits to the close up where you could see beads of sweat on their faces I had accomplished what I decided to do. I’d even taken a quick scoot through them upon getting home due to my concerns about the available light etc.

This was my view at 4:11am with a nice cold refreshing beer in hand. Amazingly being up for nearly 21hrs at this point, driving some 400+ miles and done a live shoot I was wide awake on adrenaline. Great feeling.

The image shows L-R,  Sam Wood, Toby Jepson and Nic Wastell

I have agreed that no actual images from the event will be made public without the express permission of Wayward Sons therefore this blog post is almost anorexic in imagery. One small montage which I can show is below. I compiled this for the fans page as a momento of the evening and it has the bands approval to be published.

 

The band are L-R Dave Kemp, Sam Wood, Phil Martini, Toby Jepson & Nic Wastell.

The gig itself was superb and the whole band did themselves proud. The enthusiasm, energy and belief on stage was visible to all and received enthusiastically by the crowd. The setlist was a trial run for the new stuff, which is superb, mixed with a few Angels classics thrown in.

The setlist as recovered by Mr Damian Gore –

Final image here is of Toby and myself just before I left the Louisiana. Taken by an unknown person on my phone my shirt was finally drying out and I was not looking forward to the impending 4hr drive ahead. Smiles anyway.

Moving forward Toby mentioned me doing some more live gig photography for the band on their upcoming support tours around the UK. I hope he’s good to his word on that, as I love the live gig stuff, and would love to be involved with the band at some level going forward. I think they have a bright future ahead of them.

All images are © to Cecil Paul Studio’s and Wayward Sons Band UK and may not be copied, reproduced or used in any manner without approval.

Vintage Motorbike Racing

When not on a commissioned job, or working in the studio and I actually have a weekend free I like to take a look at local motor racing circuits and see whats on. Usually there’s nothing of interest happening or the wife has something organised for us. Last weekend however my Saturday was free, yes totally free and with the VMCC holding one of their racing events at my local circuit Cadwell Park I was on my way.

I love Cadwell Park as the place is quite simply a superb circuit, non of the flat round and round places that are all too common these days. Full of hills and sweeping bends with the infamous mountain it ticks all the boxes for spectators and photographers alike. The VMCC events are totally open so you can have a good, unrestricted wander around looking at the machinery on show. The facilities are good, there’s always a burger van there for lunch and coffee which is reasonably priced and finally the toilets are clean and functional. There is a hospitality building, if that’s your Raceday thing, excellent access to a good 80% of the racing with just one small strip inaccessible. Official photography is exclusive to one chap, which I find odd for such a big place. Access to the prime spots is therefore a non starter, though there are plenty of places you can stand if the crowds aren’t too big. A nice 200-400 zoom or fixed 400mm 2.8 would create an even keel though as you could reach across to achieve those angles. Justifying the £8k spend to the wife would be a tad difficult though lol.

I enjoy this racing for two reasons. Firstly I rode motorbikes in my youth having range of Yamaha’s from 350cc through to 750cc over several years. Fabulous carefree times where the adrenaline rush of twisting a throttle and being catapulted down the road made my youthful brain buzz. Living in Germany for three years and having speed limit free autobahns made fun for modding the latter, bigger engined machines, and in the early 90’s and quieter roads having an absolute hoot out there. Secondly I love capturing motorsport and movement. Motorsport, like gymnastics, needs to have a perspective of movement. All of the top publications will show on track imagery with a sense of movement. This will be within the tires and spokes of the vehicles as nothing else really moves. A adjusting settings to continually provide this effect, coupled with some clever planning helps produce some lovely imagery. Doing this consistently to provide a gallery of the days events takes some skill. I see many online images that are simply awful in tat the bike has been shot at such a high speed it simply looks stationary. Not ideal when trying to provide that sense of movement.

I was actually approached by a group of men, from a local amateur photography club, who stated they were struggling with aperture speeds around the 1/1000th of a second. They had recognised my “Gear” and labelled me either Semi Pro or Pro so popped over for a chat. Lovely blokes, well mannered and respected the fact I was cracking on capturing the racing. In short they where simply after the fastest shutter speed they could grab to freeze the action. They almost had a seizure when I showed them a shutter speed under 1/250th sec. To put it simply they tried it, failed at the panning and surprisingly went back to high shutter speed, high ISO’s and medium apertures of F4+. Using stock kit lenses didn’t help their cause on flexibility but with the day being clear and bright they could easily capture imagery like mine with a bit of effort. Even under 1/250th and an ISO 100 gave me apertures of between f.35 – f11 through the day. Anyway they stayed at their super speed options as I came across them again when I moved to the chicane. Blasting away on high speed shutter with high speed apertures and ISO’s it was like they were shooting some rare, single moment, wildlife rather than repetitive circuit racing. Oh well.

All in all I had a fabulous day. The smell of 2 stroke oil in the air, rasping engines all blessed with some bright dry weather made things great. From traditional motorcycles to scooters, sidecars and the odd rare one off’s that survive into today an excellent day out for any petrolhead. A plus point, for me anyway, being that a few riders came to me for business cards made things worthwhile.

A couple of images from the day now follow. To see the entire days images see here 2017 VMCC Cadwell Park

A Norton, I believe..

These sidecar guys are brave or a little unhinged or potentially both.

A BSA Bantam in full flow.

Equipment wise all images were captured using a Canon 5Diii with Canon 70-200mm IS ii zoom. Settings varied owing to location and light available but nothing shot over 1/250th sec thus portraying the speed involved.

Oh for one of those magic Media Passes to reach the prime shooting points 😂

New Year & New Avenue of Work

2017 started off with a whole host of new bookings within the gymnastics event coverage. Building on the success and increased work of 2016 we had been booked to cover a whole host of UK gymnastic qualifying events throughout the North of England. Whilst at the same time last year we were taking stock of the year ahead, assessing our existing and planning new equipment we were planning hotels and travel for the January event bookings.

Now let’s be honest here in that we all want to be busy, all year, and this year we have indeed almost reached saturation point for weekend bookings. There are literally a couple we have free in July/August though I’m expecting those to probably go with our new line of event coverage.

Whilst being busy all of the time is indeed nice and rewarding it does cause an issue for some basic requirements such as servicing equipment. Items such as the die sublimation printer should be serviced every 2 years and ours has now slipped into its third year owing to this quick start of business. Our servicing centre wanted 2 weeks for turnaround and with them being closed for the whole xmas period this was just not tenable. Reading the forums though this shouldn’t be a cause of concern for up to 5 years. I just hope the stories of longevity and robust build quality also apply to our printer which I will give a big cuddle before each event.

Both of our Canon 5Diii’s have now exceeded 100,000 actuations with one now over 160,000 actuations. The cash to replace or repair them sits patiently in an account as I’m not just purchasing against a what if scenario. We know the higher shutter count body is the main issue having exceeded the 150,000 manufacturers guarantee yet I know of 5Diii bodies well in excess of 200,000 clicks and still going strong for fellow event photographers. Spending oodles of cash, on a “what if” policy, to simply have the latest bodies is not my style. Indeed I could replace the current 5D’s with brand new 5D’s & grips for less than a single 1Dxii after the recent price drops. This will be explored when the inevitable happens and I see how deep my pockets are yet how short my arms seem to have become.

The only new piece of equipment, so far this year, has been the acquisition of a new Mac Book Pro to replace the windows laptop which was simply pathetic at handling large amounts of RAW files. This gives us two MBP’s for events which are now making the whole desk workflow system work superbly. I’m certainly not going to slag off the windows laptop as I’m sure it will have uses for some but as a large RAW file handling machine and Photoshop processing tool it just didn’t cut the mustard for us.

So I really ought to mention our new avenue of work which we have been signed up to cover. This opportunity arose, as almost always, through a recommendation from an existing customer. The world of all things equestrian was requiring a local photographer to cover some regional competition work and would we be interested. To cut a long story short we applied, exchanged business details/models, discussed expectations and agreed to a one year trial contract. It was a great decision, business is brisk and being published in national horsey magazines certainly doesn’t harm our reputation. More on this in a future blog.

The image I will leave you with today comes from the studio. Yes we still have the studio going between all the weekend event work, not as busy as I would like it to be but then we have never promoted it and just rely on word of mouth.

This lovely young lady just had the most beautiful eyes and amazingly didn’t require oodles of bribery from her parents to look into the camera.