An evening with The Queen - Esma Redzepova

After not being able to take pictures of her last concert, finally, Esma Redžepova, The Queen of Roma Music, was back in Ljubljana. This time she visited Cvetličarna and was in a very good mood. I took a few seconds off before the TV crews were in the room to get some of her smiles captured. I didn't know much about her besides knowing who she is, but i was impressed to learn later she had been nominated for nobel peace prize twice for her humanitarian work, learned the fact she played more than 15000 concerts in her career and that she adopted 47 boys with her late housband. Amazing lady, so full of energy. Here are some moments before and during the show. Enjoy!

Third event of the night - Tribute 2 Love

Sometimes shooting a concert in a small club from a distance can be fun too, especially if that means your work day has ended and it is time for some beers :) Listening Tribute 2 Love live is always cool and i can't wait these guys get some more attention and start their tour so people all over can hear them. Here are some moments from the concert last week.

... a bit of ice skating shadows

No winter here, but some figure ice skating champions visited us to do a show. Hard to photograph, and no ideal lightning in the hall. Well, at the end, lights went out, my camera almost went into the bag, you could only hear some music (yes, this is a music photo blog more or less) and then suddenly this musicians appeared on ice...

Most popular position singers take on stage?

I often observe the singers behaviour on stage, how they interact with the crowd, the band, sound engineers, photographers etc, you know, little details like hand movements, how they look at the set list, how they give signals to stop the song to the band, etc...so many details to watch. I can say you can see lots of interesting things up there. I travelled to do an assignment in Zagreb yesterday to photo the concert in memory of legendary croatian songwriter/composer Đorđe Novković. More than 20 popular ex-Yu singers attented and played his songs, from Severina, Danijela, Žejko Bebek, Kemal Monteno, Toni Cetinski, Petar Grašo, Vlado Kalember, Jasna Zlokić, Mišo Kovač and others. Looking at the pictures today, i quickly noticed probably the most popular position most of them took on stage. Can you guess which one it is by looking at the pictures below?

On Stage with Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Well i never tought my Vienna Philharmonic orchestra story wil continue. But it did. They say this is the world No #1 philharmonic orchestra. Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer and them came to Ljubljana to play in Cankarjev dom. I tought this might be an excellent opportunity to continue work on my sound check project and it turned out it was. During the rehearsals i was allowed on stage, below stage, above the stage , basically anywhere for quite a while. I am not much of classic music listener, but listening to this orchestra and being with them on stage (i took an empty seat of one orchestra violin member) and shoot from his position for a while) is simply cool. The stage area is very accoustic and therefore every shutter click is heard all over the place and the wooden construction sound shell behind the orchestra is even louder if you walk around. I couught myself listening to them instead of shooting quite a few times :) Amazing experience which almost got ruined by my card reader, that somehow corrupted the images on card to become sliced in a weird pattern, while thumbnails were ok (anyone with this problem?) . I managed to rescue the thing by connecting the usb cable directly to my camera and transferring the images manually from there. Anyway, another cool sound check project fisnished :) Enjoy some images...

EMA - or Slovenian Eurovision Song Contest

National television was my home for 3 days, from dusk till dawn as they say :) I will not post the stage images as you can see them everywhere and they're quite boring, but instead post a few shadow profiles which can be nice to catch before the main light turn on for performers. These are the shots of Eva Černe start coreography and Helena Blagne, our pop music diva, just seconds before the cameras started rolling.