I got back from Australia last week and the moment I landed, its been a whirlwind of back to back shooting; on the spot editing; mosh pits; crazy fans; amazing music and great company rolled up in one crazy weekend.
This ladies and gentlemen is what it’s like to cover Baybeats, one of the biggest music festival featuring both international and local artists in Singapore.

As mentioned in my previous post, Esplanade invited me to cover Baybeats 2013 this year.
Gig photography is not something I do very often; in fact, the last and only time I shot gigs was during Baybeats last year.
As with every type of photography, gigs require a good amount of concentration to anticipate the moment or the part of the music where say the guitarist jumps in the air or if someone is crowd surfing.

Can you say WHEEEEEEEEE

I got my Leica ME about 3 months ago and every single one of my current projects are done on that camera.
I travelled to Australia with just the ME and 35mm and since I preach the ‘every camera can do anything if the photographer knows how‘, I had an idea.
Why not shoot the entire festival with a manual focus camera and a maximum ISO of 2500?

I did.

Baybeats 2013

All I brought to the shoot

I brought a 35mm; 50mm Summilux, the ME and a ‘I seriously don’t know what I am doing’ face.
All I can say is…
Manual focus at the Powerhouse stage was a bitch.

Focus this with the lights blasting into your eyes.

Yes, I took a big risk with my equipment this year’s but hey, I don’t need a 100 point AF to shoot gigs. It can be done with one camera, a 50mm, 35mm and a hell lot of concentration since I can’t exactly shoot a thousand frames a second with my camera.
Anyways, enough of my ramblings. Here are some of the images I made during the festival:

I started the shoot with Frida, an amazing group from Melbourne Australia.

I know it is not the best videos around but I am a huge fan of their music!
You can find them on their Facebook as well.

Hopefully, I’ll have the opportunity to shoot/ listen to them live when I head back to Melbourne!

So pretty!

Next up was Sub:Shaman, a band from Singapore with a very interesting sound.

Yes, I am obsessed with his afro!

Priceless Stupid Box from Malaysia at the Powerhouse stage was really challenging but it was interesting to watch the 2 trombones rocking with the band!

The crowd loves them

The Psalms from Singapore really rocked their set.
Helps that the fireworks went off while they were playing.

Modulogeek is not exactly my type of music but it was a good experiment visually as I played the ‘how slow can you go’ game with myself.

The bands above concludes Day 2 of Baybeats for me but I was not done.
Even though I was not scheduled to shoot during Day 3, I went down anyway and am so glad to be able to shoot Flawed Element as hands down, I got my best images out of the entire festival from them.

With that, this concludes Baybeats 2013 for me.

A huge thank you to Esplanade for inviting me back as an alumni as I really enjoyed shooting Baybeats.
Shout out to Aloysius, the budding photographers team of this year, Alvin, Lionel, Donald, Danny, Reuven and the people I met during Baybeats.
Pizza soon guys and see you at Baybeats 2014(: