WORDS AND PHOTOS BY STEPHEN BROWNLEE

I was waiting for weeks in anticipation to see if I got approved to shoot Royal Blood and when I got the green light on the morning before I was counting the hours to get out of my day job and race home to pull an all-nighter in research to prepare for this show.

I’ve only been a concert photographer for a year so my studies for the night consisted of past performances of the group via YouTube as well as camera settings and lighting. The English band, which consists of two members Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher, is in the middle of their North American Tour that started in mid-September and they made their Los Angeles stop on Thursday, November 11th in front of a sold-out show at The Wiltern.

I arrived and jumped in line right when the doors opened. Once I got in I grabbed some shots of fans in RB shirts and merch tables with a 50mm lens. The show started around 8 pm with one opener for the evening which was an English punk band called Hot Wax. They performed a small set with about half a dozen songs then Royal Blood was up about 30-45 minutes later.

In between sets I took that time to observe the set and made my adjustments in my camera. For the night because of where I was only authorized to shoot I pulled out the 70-200mm lens. Fans waited in anticipation as the lights went out and the duo came out to Ennio Morricone’s theme from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. I only had the authorization to shoot the first three songs not just at the rail but in the entire house so I started to snap as much as I could get since it was going to be a short night work-wise.

Fortunately one of the three songs they played first was my favorite called “Little Monsters”. I converted the photos when I got home and called it a night so I could edit them on my way to the office in the morning. I narrowed my photos down to around eleven performance shots and some BTS shots too.

My favorite color shot would be Mike front and center of the mic with guitar in hand and my favorite black and white shot is also involving Mike this time with his back against the crowd and standing in front of a wall of lights. When editing through Lightroom I did some shots in color and some in monochrome as usual and I left a little noise in some shots because I love to give my shots a classic rock feel. I spent the following night studying how resolution works in the photos after it’s converted from Lightroom into a JPEG.

ROYAL BLOOD