A few weeks ago I was contacted to cover a few shows for Rise Against on their new your with Billy Talent. As I was already contracted to cover their show in Montreal, I offered to make my way down to Quebec City for the first show of the tour.
Rise Against are probably one of my fave bands to listen to these last few years, so I was more than happy to make 500km round trip for the all access to the show.
Not only is the management and crew top notch, the show was insanely fun. The Centre Videotron was packed for the first time in 2 years, the fans were crowd surfing, the security was actually smiling.
I spent most of my time ping ponging between pit and stage, making a few forays into the packed crowd. You kind of get led by intuition, and sometimes, you just make the best you can with the visuals in front of you, all the while making some quick 15 sec videos for their IG stories being fed by the social media team back in LA.
Switching from a 70-200, a 24-70 and a 16-35 gave me enough variety. The photo pit had some speaker stacks that limited the available shots, so when you can’t get variety via access, you do so with lens selection and look for different angles.
All images done with a pair of Canon R6 mirrorless cameras. While I try and focus more on the emotions and purpose, I’ve been having loads of questions about the R6 and R5 in concerts, how well the face tracking performs. Keeper rate? While I rarely ever shoot high speed, out of the 500 shots I took, 3 were missed focus and about a dozen with off but acceptable focus. No regrets moving from dSLR.
Below is a selection of images I sent in to the band. I did send them colour and black and white as their socials mostly all go the monochrome way.
