Alice Cooper
Last night I photographed the Ace Frehley/Alice Cooper show. The way TEG works is you have to leave the building after your 3 songs are up in the pit. It's bullshit honestly, especially with how last night was because it was pouring down with rain and the foyer at the Arena is massive and there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't stay in there waiting for the next part of the show to photograph. Not even allowing that cold weather is pretty bad for asthma, we have to keep walking our bags of equipment through it.
Lucky for me a friend photographer was also reviewing the show so she gave me her +1 so I could stay but to show how ridiculous and unglamorous passes are - we had to go outside every time to meet the person who would then escort us to the front of stage for our allocated photo time, then back outside. At least having tickets to the show we could bypass that part but it meant seeing the cloakroom lady several times that night to hand our bags back and forth. Then outside the security insist they HAVE to go through your bags even though they've seen them twice already. It's aggravating and I barely have the patience for it.
For Ace we had 3 songs and I ended up taking around 130 photos. Pretty sure 100 of them are identical.
For Alice we had 4 songs and that's the most I've ever had in a photo pit (not including rare nights like last Thursday or local shows where there's no rules). We were allowed to use flash but were recommended to not use it which did worry me if the lighting would possibly be really dark but it was pretty good, and there was no contract! That was the biggest surprise of all. No "don't sell photos!". No "you can't show your photos to anyone!".
The downside to it all was how much pain I was in half way through taking photos of him. I was on tip toes a couple times trying to see and the pain caused was just awful. As soon as we were back in the foyer to cloak our bags I was digging out my codiene and heading to buy a drink. I wish I could say they helped but they didn't. The rest of the show was spent standing up and the bottom half of my back on the left was just in agony. I'm not even sure I could say it's a pulled muscle because I did nothing to pull it, can you even pull something there? After the show my backpack and I walked to the train station, slowly, to find out the train was only going to Whitfords and then it was a bus trip to Joondalup. The bus ride was definitely the cherry on top for shittness. By the time I got home I had a big old cry and the pain didn't subside til 3am. Even now there's still a little bit of pain there but thankfully nowhere as severe and only if I move. I have Fiona Stanley in 2 days, I really hope they're helpful!! It's frustrating knowing that one night of "work" can have me in so much pain and it's never consistent in where the pain is, like last night my neck is completely fine! I know photographers that do this a couple nights a week. When you consider photo taking is maybe 30-45mins total depending on the show, and you're only standing for about 4 hours, it just shouldn't be this hard. Thankfully I have nothing gig wise until next month. I'm pretty glad about this if I'm too be completely honest.
You can check out the full photo gallery here