Mark Greenmantle Photography

A small selection of shots from the many dozens of gigs I’ve shot has now been uploaded here.
All shots from this folder are available as prints on archive quality Kodak paper. Contact me via email or drop in to my office in Voodoo Lulu, 240 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley.

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

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:

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.

Both as a time saving action and to allow me to change my main website pages from where-ever I may have net access, I am moving most of my main website across to this WordPress blog.  If you had linked through my pricing, terms and conditions, about or links pages for anything, expect those links to break in the next couple of weeks. Eventually nearly all of my site will operate off this WordPress blog platform. 

In other news, scroll down to the blog roll and check out what Chris Weeks has been shooting at the Spirit Awards. http://aphotocontributor.typepad.com/
Chris has been my fav shooter for quite a good few years now. He might often chide me for shooting Nikon instead of Leica and Canon but is advice over the years has always been brilliant, fair and well worth keeping in mind.  His main site is at www.chrisweeks.net and that is your ‘goseeums’ for today. =)

Mostly of late I have been sticking to just my nightclub shooting. It’s usually fun, certainly keeps me on my toes, great for networking with new people all the time and the challenge of capturing quality shots in fast moving nightclub light just strangely makes me feel good. Here are a few of my recent works:

DJ Spiderbaby takes a break in Club Blink – Friday 13th

I became somewhat obsessed with this lighting effect at Club Blink – Friday 13th

Jesse Dracman of Devilution at Club Blink – Friday 13th

Wolfmother are back, with Andrew Stockdale fronting a bigger new line-up of band members, lots of new music and a lot more energy.
I enjoyed the chance to cover their first live gig on Friday night and the energy there was astounding. The atmosphere was intense, with a very excited crowd of 300 packing out the intimate sized Valley studios. The heat was on (and that could also refer to the air-con struggling with the temperature) and Wolfmother delivered a vibrant return that is bound to please. I’m no music writer so I’ll say the rest with pictures.

There are many more shots uploaded to http://greenmantle.biz/wolfmother and the shots are going to be on the Wolfmother site in the next week or two. =)

Midnight has just hit and I am about to go and catch a half decent sleep before diving back into a week of fashion photography and night time processing.

So, with the need for sleep weighing heavily I will keep this brief, Thursday night was the kick off of the Queensland tour of The Armada, led by Jeff Martin (former front man of The Tea Party). I drove from work at North Lakes down to Coolangatta in heavy rain (and with very confusing Google map directions) and shot some backstage fun, and the whole gig (which was so good, I will have to make another post later just to detail why I feel my loss of hearing and ringing ears are so worth it still on a Sunday night) before getting myself home in similar conditions by about 2am.

After work on Friday I only had to make my way to the Guild Bar at QUT where The Armada played in sweltering conditions and I mostly stuck to shooting just the show as we were all hot, sweaty and not enjoying technical hassles at the venue. After working with The Armada I drove into the Valley to shoot my usual social pics atClub Blink and stuck around till closing as usual.

Saturday night things at QUT just gelled perfectly, the lads had been doing hours and hours of soundchecks to fix the previous nights tech hassles and the audio quality was exceptional. I shot a fair number of pics backstage, as the band and the other performers were far more relaxed and it was just a little cooler than it had been on Friday. All up, on Saturday night after covering the gig, snapping some socials of regulars from previous Jeff Martin gigs hanging with the band and then covering socials again at 299′s Club Trash, I’d snapped about 2200 images.

Over the last four days I have shot over 4000 images for The Armada, most of which are quite usable, proving the Nikon D3 defies the usual hit and miss hassles endured by most gig photographers. Being able to shoot at ISO6400 while not stressing about noise is just brilliant.  The only issue now is that I still have 3400 images left to process, most of them being in Nikon NEF RAW format.

I’ll trawl through them for the best of the best shots and will post up sometime through the week.  =)