In a thoroughly unusual turn of events, yesterday I turned up to shoot Jean Michel Jarre‘s first world tour when it came to Wembley Arena only to be given a AAA laminate and told that I could stay as long as I wanted.  Huzzah!  Makes a change from the usual three song limit.

Looking like a combination of a keyboard museum and an airport control tower, the stage was a monument to digital music without an acoustic instrument in site (until he broke out an accordian for an added touch of Gallic culture..)

Having never really shot that many lasers before, this was a bit of a trial by fire as I’ve never really considered the relationship between the frequency of the laser beams and the shutter speed of the camera. When JMJ came to the front of the stage for his famous “laser harp” section, I found that anything faster than 45th of a second would result in some of the beams missing but anything slower than 250th on the 400mm lens would show movement.  The real pain is that the lighting rig is so good that the stage is flooded with more light than you could ever need but you end up shooting at painfully slow speeds to capture the beams.  Bahh.  Anyway, enough technical business..

Having only ever done a handful of one-off dates in previous years, the “In Doors” tour is surprisingly his first world tour and is now heading off to Northern England, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland before heading to the US in 2010.

Thanks go to LD Communications for arranging the extended access at the concert. Cheers peeps!