Mark Greenmantle Photography

I’m in between shoots tonight, taking a break at The Melbourne Hotel before heading to the Hi-Fi new bar again. It opens tonight. Things are going well with my new client and I am finding them brilliant to work with.  I spent half of the afternoon shooting branding at The Hi-Fi’s new Vinyl bar and chatting to the creative director of the advertising firm I am working through.  It looks like I should be getting work shooting a lot of the gigs there in the next year. =]

Later tonight I will be back to the usual gig at 299, Saturday Trash is on and I will be battling the hoardes that frequent the venue. The venue itself has been cleaned up a great deal of late….

First though, food… in the midst of West End and the options for good food here is near endless, not always cheap but I do need to eat somewhere other than Indian Kitchen. The food there is damn well addictive. =]

I have seen a couple of different programs designed to cover all aspects of managing and marketing a photographic business. While sourcing a single program that could manage the entire day to day running of a photographic business I wonder how well these work in with Australian taxes, and the BAS requirements ect ect… I am keen on them for purposes of the follow up marketing call reminders, deadline management, late invoice reminder generators and other functionality that leads to better business management.

If anyone knows of a program/programs that suit these functions and is easily geared to Australian business standards I am keen to hear feedback.

In other news, I’m catching up on processing older shoots this week and will have the usual nightclub shots up on their usual locations by Friday night. I’ve been approached by a few different TAFE/UNI Photography students asking to interview me for part of their assessments. I’m open to this but still feel surprised they chose me to interview.

On Monday I will be able to catch up with Evil D of Morbid Angel, haven’t seen him since his tour with the Genitorturers. I bet their manager doesn’t think to arrange day trips around Brissy as they had with Richard and the Faith team. That man sure knows his reptiles. =)

Recent shots from the tour with Jeff Martin and The Armada are up already on www.thearmada.com

As many of you have already gleaned from the myriad of entertaining posts recently dropped onto my Facebook page, I’ve moved from Albion into an entertaining batch-pad/video-audio-photo-studio/optics-chem-lab/astrophysics lab in Jindalee (click for map).

I’m living with Mikael and Dan Altoff, and downstairs in the dungeon we hide another housemate called Cameron. Cam’s the night shift manager of the hotel at the Casino. Mikael is doing his Masters in Astrophsics/Education and is working on the Impact Australia Documentary here and also creates specialised coatings for solar panels through his day job at Uni Qld. He’s also in a band but I cannot recall what it is called in its current incarnation. Dan is the DJ from Crystals at The Beat on weekends as well so music here is a strong focus, you can always hear something piping from one corner of the house or studio.
If you’re on Facebook, add Impact Australia to get regular updates on the progress of the doco. Here’s a link to the first part of the previews for the entire tour in HD video.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo#/video/video.php?v=55395239025&ref=mf

So, aside from having moved home and studio across town, I’m also now doing design and photography for Forensic Press LLC, a new publishing firm a long time friend (and formerly my crim profiling lecturer) has started which is focussed on criminology so expect a fair few posts to come of a forensic criminolgy slant.

I am still shooting for the clubs on the weekends for now but it looks as though the commercial work will allow me to let that slide in the coming months. I do look forward to regaining my weekends! In the meantime, clubs like Blink and Trash will still get my Friday and Saturday night attention and score shots like this one of Lynchmada:

Tomorrow night I am kicking off a quick tour with Jeff Martin and the Armada, Brisbane (The Hi-Fi, West End), then The Troubadour (Valley Mall), Gold Coast and Byron Bay with me shooting stills and my housemate Mikael shooting HD Video for the Armada website. This will be the fifth or sixth time I have worked on tours by Jeff though the first of these was when he was singing with The Tea Party in 1999 and I was interviewing him then for the Courier-Mail instead of taking pics. Jeff’s manager is brilliant for making sure that the lighting is what is required for best photographic results and I look forward to working with the usual crew again.

As things are settling from the move I am getting the chance to catch up on some older work that previously proved difficult to do, and my new studio space means I can again get my teeth into fashion and other photographic projects. I have a few burlesque projects up my sleeve and hope to string a few of the local talented performers into some spectacular roles I have in mind.  I’m developing something of an obsession for WWII period style and you should expect to see quite a lot of this in the next year or so.

When the War is over, I'll be waiting

I had no idea of this until yesterday when I received a call saying I ought to check out a book released by Events Queensland but they’d used shots of mine to promote The Abbey Medieval Festival. I am yet to see this and only vaguely knew it was going to be made late last year. Next week I hope to ressurrect the hard drives from my old system that have been problematic and hold all of my Abbeypics.
Steve Lippis is now running the Photographic Team for the Abbey which gives me the option of either shooting or getting myself into gear - doing some training and taking up the offer of getting on the field with the Knights Order of Lion Rampant. Damien apparently has kit that will fit my long limbs and I’m tempted, very tempted to endure the pressure cooker effect armor has under Australian sun if it gives me a chance to get back onto the tourney field.

Steve will soon have formal photographic team submission openings posted but there will be far fewer in the team this year.

links to The Abbey and to Lion Rampant.
http://www.abbeytournament.com/

http://www.lionrampant.com.au/

They’re back!!! Once again zombies are about to take over Fortitude Valley for another night of madness. Club Blink has a zombie theme again tonight so I can safely assume I will rock up home tomorrow morning half covered in fake gore and with two full CF memory cards of undead undead undead. The hoard of living dead will arrive online at http://greenmantle.biz/BLINK once the images are processed.

I also got to grab some fashion shots in the CBD while visiting Faith Nightclub last weekend. Pictured below is Jess in a corset and some killer heels. Sorry, no brands to divulge, we were just aiming at an overall look to go with the great architecture at the top end of town.

Last Friday I was shooting for Jeff Martin (formerly front man of The Tea Party) down at the Coolangatta Hotel again and have now uploaded images of both this and other Jeff Martin and the Armada gigs at http://greenmantle.biz/jeffmartin/. Many thanks to Jeff and to John Reid at  JGR Management for the full access again! It’s great to work with this team and having now shot for Jeff six times I can anticipate fairly well what to expect on stage movement wise which helps no end in gig photography.

As always the concert was brilliant, and while it was an acoustic set, Jeff belted out a good helping of the old favorites from The Tea Party as well as his new Armada tracks:

Jeff’s roadie Kenny has his own fan club on facebook. Half of the front row cat called Kenny each time he came out to swap guitars or to light candles onstage and it looked as if Jeff was about to piss himself laughing at it more than a few times.

More shots will be added soon as I work my way through a backlog of work I have been catching up on since finally replacing a burned out old PC. (again kudos to Monk at Computer Function for the trade up to the new system!)

all images ©Mark Greenmantle Photography 2009

All the currently loaded galleries (open in new windows/tabs)
Live @ The Cooly Hotel 23rd Feb ‘08 Gallery
Live @ The Troubador 17th Sept ‘08 Gallery
Live @ The Cooly Hotel 6th March ‘09 Gallery
more Jeff Martin gig galleries being uploaded very soon!

In other news, I am still very much enjoying using Windows Beta7. No idea yet how things will change come August when the beta expires but I’m dead keen on the new Windows. It’s now closer to using Mac interface, just a bit, and yes there are some  bugs that need ironing out (setting up networking as been overly simplified - I want straight out tools in advanced mode without jumping through too many windows) but overall I am happy with the stability, the speed is superb and I have had no problems with drivers at all. Adobe Lightroom is running at a great speed on this and what used to take my pc all day to batch now gets knocked over in the time it takes to make a snack.

Finally, Sigma optics have just announced new lenses at the PMA 09 event but only the new 24-70 f/2.8 really interests me as the rest of them are in the small APS-C format:

Tonight I am working again with Jeff Martin at the Cooly Hotel (click for tickets) as he brings his wonderful solo set on another Australian tour. JGR Management have been working with Jeff for a while now and their partnership makes it very easy for me to join the team and produce photography for Jeff’s future art and for his soon to be released Armada website (kudos to the wonderful Marco for great designs there! both websites and posters and album art for Jeff)

Jeff Martin live at the Troubador

If you were a fan of The Tea Party, I strongly suggest you head over to Jeff Martin’s page and take a listen at which way his music has gone now. http://www.myspace.com/jeffmartinsolo

So, here are the dates for upcoming gigs for Jeff Martin and The Armada, I’ll be at all of the SEQ shows:
6 Mar 2009 8:00 P JEFF MARTIN - SOLO COOLANGATTA, Queensland

JEFF MARTIN - SOLO HOBART, Tasmania

JEFF MARTIN - SOLO SCARBOROUGH, Western Australia

JEFF MARTIN - SOLO NORTH FREMANTLE, Western Australia

THE ARMADA MELBOURNE, Victoria

THE ARMADA WOOLONGONG, New South Wales

THE ARMADA SYDNEY, New South Wales

THE ARMADA BRISBANE, Queensland

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY BRISBANE, Queensland

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY GOLD COAST, Queensland

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY BYRON BAY, New South Wales

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY COFFS HARBOUR, New South Wales

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY NEWCASTLE, New South Wales

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY CRONULLA, New South Wales

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY SYDNEY, New South Wales

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY EAST BRUNSWICK, Victoria

THE ARMADA FREMANTLE, Western Australia

Wolfmother have published a gallery of my shots on their myspace page and will hopefully soon release their new site using more of my shots.

Wolfmother Myspace page featuring my photography

I earlier posted my fav shots of the gig at Valley Studios in this blog post.

I have had to hold off on exporting a few jobs from around new years due to my Lightroom 2 program trial expiring in my old system. Now with an entirely new OS installed I have kicked a new copy of Lightroom into gear and will be able to catch up on those jobs. To have started them over in Lightroom 1.4 would have lost a lot of editing already done in formats not supported in the older version.

While in WinXP Lightroom 2 sucked resources like crazy, in Windows7 beta it is taking only a fraction of the RAM and CPU load to do the job and much, much faster. It doesn’t hurt that Monk built me a new pc with twice as much RAM and a newer CPU at all, but the difference is far beyond the hardware upgrade alone.

Lots to work on tonight so I’ll shut up and process pics. Will post some up soon.

I dropped in at Computer Function today and Monk there
has built me a shiny new pc!
I’m finally running an NVidea video card that can really keep
up with my Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom needs. It’s the 9500GT.
Ram is up to 4GB and we have an insane 6 hard drives in the box.
This will keep me working up to speed until I can fund the
monster we are planning on building here soon…. more news on that later.

I still have the old WinXP box for use as a media
server at home but the new one is using the Win7Beta.
I’m posting this from the new IE8 beta and it’s much quicker
but the back end of my wordpress blog is resolving to
mishaped tables making this hard to read as I type…

Everything else so far is testing as stable and outrageously fast
so processing images should now take only a fraction of the time they used to.
Connect to Computer Function in Indooroopilly, Brisbane
via www.computerfunction.com.au