Viikate is quite an interesting Finnish band. The base classification for their music is metal, but it has it’s own vibe to it. The vibe comes from the modernization of rautalanka-music with its melancholy lyrics (what Finnish music doesn’t have melancholy lyrics?). If Volbeat is at all familiar, you can think of the same effect that Volbeat has on rockabilly, Viikate has on rautalanka.

We originally got introduced to Viikate through their album of Christmas songs: Vuoden synkin juhla (The Gloomiest Holiday of the Year). It has cover versions of traditional, melancholy Christmas songs and some originals. And yes, it does play on our stereo around Christmas, just as do Raskasta Joulua and Twisted Sisters Christmas album. What can I say, it’s a metal household.

The venue this time wasn’t really the basement stage of Kellari but the upstairs ballroom of Karjalantalo. It’s a place that has held many a dance and concert. Mostly though with bands playing either rautalanka or iskelmä. The velvet curtains surrounding the stage just added to Viikate’s charm.

The gig was extremely entertaining and in the front row the power of the guitars was so enjoyable. And watching two skilled guitarists play is always a treat.

With the exlusion of the Finnish summer festivals outdoors, I couldn’t have hoped for better lighting. Their stage light was mostly white and thus gave plenty of opportunities for good shots. The only real issue I had with the gig was that my 28-75 is often a bit too long when in the front row in small venues. But the 11-16 is too wide. There’s a 12mm gap that needs filling ;)

As usual, more pictures in our gallery.

We initially noticed Kotiteollisuus from their music video Rakastaa, Ei rakasta. We were working on a scale model of a house for a school project of Anna’s and from the corner of my eye I saw a very familiar scene on the TV. The beginning of the video has a view of the Kaukas pulp and paper mill. I spent my childhood and teenage years in the shadow the mill, so the views were very familiar. Ever since I’ve been a fan of their later albums (which are more melodic than their earlier work). I honestly don’t know how to describe them in English, in Finnish Äijä-rock (Real Man Rock?) is used and is an apt description. I guess a comparison to Zakk Wylde and Black Label Society when it comes to general image could come fairly close.

While their live show isn’t full of acrobatics or awesome shredding and such, Jouni has excellent rapport with the audience. He can taunt the drunks, but also pays attention to the rest of the crowd and acknowledges them well. And his eyes are incredibly lively…

Kotiteollisuus’ lighting was already familiar from their last gig in Joensuu (pictures), so I had a chance to experiment a bit more with the shots to get silhouettes and such. Considering the limited size of the stage and venue, I think I got some good ones.

The main issue that I have with their light is that there is very little white light. The spots lighting Jouni and Janne from the front are yellow and most of the backlight is red or blue. This time in processing I decided to do a lot more conversions to black and white to deal with this. In fact, Anna and I decided to change the well known Mythbusters saying “when in doubt, lubricate” to “when in doubt, grayscale.”

I only got a few shots of the drummer, Jari Sinkkonen, during the whole gig since he was mostly shrouded in smoke. Which is slightly surprising when you consider that I was at most five metres away from him.

As usual, more pictures in our gallery.

Shooting the show was a bit more of a challenge than usual since I dislocated my right hand little finger last Sunday and now have a cast on my right hand (making typing quite annoying as well). Luckily Anna was with me as an assistant in changing lenses and later on in selecting and editing the shots today. Of course, she’s been a tremendous help with clumsy me all along…

We’ve been fans of the Helsinki City Vampires for quite some time (Anna from even before we’d met), but this was the first time we’ve seen them live. So we really didn’t know what to expect. From Chris Owyoung’s shooting notes I knew to position myself to stage right so that Jyrki 69’s left hand wouldn’t cover his face (thanks for the tip!).

What surprised me was that when we arrived at the venue 1.5 hours before showtime, there were just a couple of people there. Even at showtime the place was half full at best and quite a large portion of the crowd weren’t metalheads (at least based on clothing choices). Is the scene in Kuopio so different from Joensuu where a smaller band will get a larger crowd or was it just the time of week and venue. After all, the venue was a hotel nightclub and not all that metal :)

Jyrki 69 was a lively performer as expected, as was Jussi 69 behind his drumset. What surprised me was how much of a stage presence Timo-Timo had right in front of me. He really was the embodiment of a rock guitarist: spinning, duck walking, and running around.

While three songs was more than enough to get a good set of shots, I really would have loved to shoot the entire gig. So much of the audience interaction and stage antics are missed when the whole show can’t be photographed. Maybe sometime in the future there will be a chance to shoot their whole show…

More pictures in our gallery.

A Pro account doesn’t cost all that much, only 9,99€ – which is about half the price of an album on CD. As such, for the amount of music available it isn’t too much since I already by an album or two every month (if not more). Of course there are technical reasons why the iPhone app isn’t so tempting after all, but a large part of my procrastinating comes from the fact that a lot of the music I like isn’t available on Spotify (smaller and older Finnish bands for example).

Spotify is a great source for music discovery and for listening to various music at work (I don’t need to sync mp3s to work from home). And many a band has found their way to my buy albums list because of the chance to listen to their work on Spotify.

Reading the recent post by Mokoma on FaceBook (via) on the amount they receive for a hundred album plays on Spotify clarified my stance. I’d much rather pay more for an album knowing that the artist receives more money from it – especially when I know that very few albums around are ones that I’d listen to a hundred times anytime soon. I’m also starting to understand why Johann Kustannus pulled their catalog from Spotify.

As a slightly off-topic ramble, I wonder if there are any albums that I’ve listened to a hundred times. From the albums I have a few might be close (Dream Theater’s Images and Words and Steve Vai’s Passion and Warfare) since they both predate mp3s and large libraries of songs to shuffle. I’ve also had both albums for over 15 years.

What I’d still like to know is the difference in revenue the band gets from online sales (e.g. iTunes) and traditional CD sales (full price). The cheaper price of album sales through iTunes is tempting since I could basically buy two albums for the price of one. On the other hand the bonus CDs and such are also tempting…

I also know that I’d like to see Spotify stick around since it is a great tool for music exploration and getting to know bands and artists. And yes, it does do bad things to my buy albums list.

Seeing a band play on their own gig instead of a festival has always been more rewarding in my mind. Ususally the mix and crowd are much better, this time wasn’t any different. Although I must admit that when I first got to the venue 45 minutes before showtime, I wondered where all the people where. The club was almost empty – I even wondered if the previous night’s W.A.S.P. gig had taken its toll. Luckily the crowd started to slowly come in and by showtime there were enough people there to get a good atmosphere going.

On the shooting side, looking at the stage before the gig I was quite afraid. The dreadful lighting from KuopioRock was still fresh in my mind. With the setup of the lights it looked like another night of horrific backlight. After the gig I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of shots that had enough side- or toplight to light the performers – at least to some extent. I was even able to drop down from ISO1600 to ISO800, which on a 30D is an important drop.

I mainly shot the gig with my Tokina 11-16/2.8 since I was right in front of the stage. I was sandwiched in the crowd almost directly in front of the Antti Remes (the bass player), so most shots of Ville were from the side. The fact that Kellari’s stage is only 6m wide and 3m deep means that there wasn’t much moving around. Thus my shots of the rest of the band were fairly limited (and the lack of light didn’t really help).

All in all it was a fun gig to see, mosh in, and shoot. But I still miss hearing certain Sentenced songs when listening to Ville’s voice.

More picture in our gallery.

No one told any of the photographers around me of a limit on how many songs we could shoot, but I did notice the pit clearing out at the beginning of the first song but didn’t pay much attention to the fact… After the first song I was asked to leave the pit (as I was already leaving it ;).

As always seems to be the case with Amorphis, Tomi’s expressions and flying hair were a good target for shooting. Of course, as a guitarist I also concentrated quite a bit on Esa and Tomi K. Neither guitarist is very flamboyant in their playing, but the ESP Eclipse’s give nice shots of guitarists playing and enjoying their music.

As was the case with Tarot’s gig, the light was fairly bright daylight diffused through some cloud cover. After I’d moved to shoot from the audience it rained a bit, giving some added spice to a few shots. I never managed to get through the crowd to where Anna was standing.

I also managed to get one of my favorite shots ever of Tomi from the audience. Again, the angle let me avoid nasal cavities completely.

As always, more pictures in our gallery. I had a really hard time selecting the shots to post here, Amorphis is quite a photogenic band.

This my second time shooting Tarot. The first was in a dark club, but the experience shooting them gave me a good feel for what to look for. Based on seeing Nightwish live (several times), I knew most of Marco Hietala’s mannerisms on stage.

And of course the lead guitarist will take their own place in the spotlight as well. At least compared to Amorphis, Zachary is very lively when playing. What really surprised me the first time was how expressive Tommi Salmela’s face and body language was during his vocal parts.

I started shooting in the pit and there didn’t seem to be a limit to how long we could shoot. After a few songs I decided to move back into the audience and find Anna and get some shots with the audience in them as well.

More pictures in our gallery.

Oh yeah, I also took a few shots of Apulanta between Poisonblack and Sonata Arctica. See the pictures in our gallery.

As I mentioned, Poisonblack played in a tent, so while the rest of the festival had good diffused light from the cloud covered sky, the stage in this case was very dark. The darkness of the stage was made even more difficult for photographers with the limited amount of front light they used in the beginning of the set. The light was so difficult to shoot in that I quite quickly decided to leave the pit and shoot from the audience.

Leaving the pit fairly soon was aided by the fact that it wasn’t too deep and the stage was fairly high. While the poses from the pit can be quite dramatic, I often like shots with a bit less of nasal cavities.

It was quite odd to listen to Ville’s voice singing something other than Sentenced, especially since it was the first time either of us saw him live. We are quite annoyed with ourselves for missing Sentenced’s farewell tour. We have listened to them a bit (Spotify only has the latest album) and the gig was good. At least I didn’t have any complaints with the sound.

My relationship with Poisonblack is a bit odd, as noted I like Sentenced very much. Ville’s music has much of the same as Sentenced, but isn’t quite as dark and gloomy and the riffs are a bit lighter. Note that any comparisons to Sentenced are made to the Sentenced of the last few albums. Anna found a great way to describe them this week when we went to buy tickets to their gig in Joensuu: Poisonblack is Sentenced’s girlfriend – a bit less extreme.

See more pictures of Poisonblack in our gallery.

Sonata had a strict limit of shooting three songs from the pit. For some reason, the lighting in the first three songs in these cases tends to be quite dark and heavy on the backlight when compared to the lighting in later songs. Which is why I continued to shoot from the audience.

In the Sonata Arctica forums I read some disappointed comments on the gig from fans (who’ve seen the band play more than enough times). I don’t know about them, but when its the first time of seeing one of your favorite bands for the first time in five years I try to enjoy it to the fullest. And enjoy I did.

In fact, I once again noticed how hard it is to shoot when your singing along – and sometimes even moshing or jumping up and down. As a photographer (and fan) I loved the way especially Tony interacts with audience. And how lively he is when performing – even if the lighting meant that I have lots of shots of a very blurry Tony.

And as an Ibanez and shredding fan, watching Elias from close up was a treat.

One of my best moments of the whole festival after Tony threw the following pose on stage:

As a fan, I acknowledged his interaction by giving him a thumbs up. He answered with the following:

Alas, the shot isn’t all that good since I had to scramble to get my camera back up. But I will always remember the interaction.

More pictures in our gallery.

Once we got home on Sunday I started to clear my memory cards (luckily I took a backup of 2×512 MB in addition to the 10 GB
I was originally taking). I started out with the borrowed 4 GB Extreme III which immediately started to cause problems.
Importing directly into Lightroom kept failing (device disconnected) after importing a varying amount of pictures. I tried
every trick I know and nothing worked…

So in desperation I decided to first empty all of the other cards, which went without a hitch. And at the same time I
noticed a little detail: the 4GB Extreme III is rated at 30 Mb/s where my own 2GB Extreme IIIs are 20 Mb/s. Apparently my
memory card reader overflows with the rate of data and drops out. Or then its my Mac (which sounds odd). But geeking
with the command line and copying files in increments and ejecting the card after each increment (100 pictures each) let me
get all the pictures. All was safe.

And there went the time that I’d allocated for a little nap next Anna. Sometimes I hate computers ;)

All in all, I took 1407 pictures during the day. Maybe a bit too much, but I’ve learned that expressions and lighting change fast and thus taking several shots of any given situation is worth it.

My first cull lead to deleting 194 absolutely useless shots. I kept many that are unsharp etc. just because they are memories for us. I’ve now finally started to go through each band that I shot and make my selections. So stay posted for updates as my editing progresses.