Lens-Artist Challenge #416 – Music

Ritva hosts this week challenge and asks us to post images that capture the energy, excitement, and emotion of live music or anything connected to it. Her original challenge post can be found here – Lens-Artist Challenge #416 – Music

I really like my music but in recent years I’ve grown less fond of attending live events. That wasn’t always the case and during the 1990’s I probably saw most of the top bands in the world, albeit with a heavy metal bias.

In those days I wasn’t into photography like I am now and mobile phones with cameras were still years away. People held up cigarette lighters at concerts instead of phone torches. All I ever came away from a gig with was a ticket stub, a tour T-shirt and my ears ringing!

That said, just like everyone else, I did use an early phone I owned to take this image of Till Lindemann at a Rammstein concert in 2010. The second image was taken with my Sony RX100 at a Steve Hackett concert two years ago. Apart from Abba Voyage in London (a virtual concert with virtual avatars) that was my last gig. I’m not sure if photos of Avatars count. I found the whole Abba thing a surreal experience.

The pictures below were taken by me on behalf of a local band called Mr Zippy who wanted some promotional shots. The images here were taken in their practice room. That was loud, hot, buzzy and good fun.

I do enjoy musical theatre. Earlier this year we saw the stage show of ‘The Greatest Showman’ in Bristol. The show ran for several months as a tester before moving to the West End in London. That show was incredible but there were really tight restrictions around any photography or filming. We had to present our phones to security staff prior to entering the theatre and we had stickers placed over the camera lenses, as per the image below. The stickers were easy to remove but everyone seemed to be respecting the restriction.

For all the reasons above I don’t have too many live venue music images to share. Thank you to Ritva for hosting. I’ll leave you with some busker images and a final image of me and a guitar. I’m faking it as a performer. In reality I’d just collected this old 1970’s Shaftsbury guitar from a Charity Shop and I was on my way home with it. It needed quite a bit of work to get it sounding good again, it smelt like it had been in someone’s attic for years. It plays and sounds great now after some renovation. The second image of Lego Phoebe is just for fun but also represents my level of guitar playing!

All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2026 – All rights reserved.