Mark Greenmantle Photography

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)

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

19 Mar 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN – SOLO HOBART, Tasmania

21 Mar 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN – SOLO SCARBOROUGH, Western Australia

22 Mar 2009

6:00 P

JEFF MARTIN – SOLO NORTH FREMANTLE, Western Australia

7 May 2009

8:00 P

THE ARMADA MELBOURNE, Victoria

8 May 2009

8:00 P

THE ARMADA WOOLONGONG, New South Wales

9 May 2009

8:00 P

THE ARMADA SYDNEY, New South Wales

10 May 2009

8:00 P

THE ARMADA BRISBANE, Queensland

12 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY BRISBANE, Queensland

14 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY GOLD COAST, Queensland

15 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY BYRON BAY, New South Wales

16 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY COFFS HARBOUR, New South Wales

17 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY NEWCASTLE, New South Wales

19 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY CRONULLA, New South Wales

20 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY SYDNEY, New South Wales

22 May 2009

8:00 P

JEFF MARTIN & WAYNE SHEEHY EAST BRUNSWICK, Victoria

6 Jun 2009

8:00 P

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.

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.