April's 'Altar Club': "More Like Trees"

It's been a while since I photographed live music, New Year's Eve Altar Club, in fact - see two Blips Dec 31st and 1st Jan.

April's Altar Club - a monthly event hosted by Salisbury Arts Centre featured 4 acts, one from Bournemouth, one was Salisbury's voted Best Live Act, the opening act I know nothing about and headliners, here, More Like Trees, from London.

Hailed by their official website as "This is an altermodern melting pot of styles reimagined as acoustic dance music. A meeting of drum n bass and folk with knowing nods towards flamenco and gypsy influences that they call ‘Strum n Bass".

Featured in my Blip is singer and main man Joshua Whitehouse, toward the end of their set and evening, just after midnight. Those fingers of his were wonderfully dextrous and adept and were a subject almost in themselves! The band also had an amazing modern upright acoustic bass that almost made my Blip. There was much spirited dancing by the audience that was at times, really quite captivating - but I kept my lens on what I was supposed to.....

Lens is Sigma EX 70-200mm f2.8 Apo, wide open and focussed manually. It has not been cropped but some exposure editing to open up the shadows. This lens is NOT the stabilised version though I get it down to shutter speeds of 1/50th sec at the long end (eqv to 300mm f2.8 on DX) and often use such speeds to inject movement blur on drummer's sticks and guitarist's strumming hands. I also used my Tamron SP 17-50mm f2.8, for the wider shots.

I only agreed to take up this coverage at 4pm this afternoon and it was not the event I mentioned in yesterday's Blip for Sunday (tomorrow) afternoon. That is now destined for Monday afternoon.

Salisbury Arts Centre and the Altar Club's organiser will get a DVD with edited images on it in due course. There are a lot of images, many of which, of course, will not get edited. But many will and that takes time, so that will invariably eat into already stretched Blipfoto time on the computer.

Have a great Sunday, everybody!