Last weekend was largest Estonian rock festival Rabarock. 18 bands on 2 days on 2 stages in middle of sticks. First day was beautiful weather and second day was pissing down rain whole day. I always liked diversity and what great opportunity to try photography in different conditions J

Music was all good and naturally famous bands like Ladytron, Antrax, KNFDM, Gary Numan were all on level one expects them to be. And naturally I always love all Estonian bands. B.D.Ö. attempted Guinness Word Record by having 42 people on stage playing Heavy Metal. Not sure if it was official record. And by the way I did not manage to take that picture for no reason at all.

I like surprises and my favorite was actually A.Human. Very theatrical singer and for change you could understand lyrics. Crisp-clear English language . Message in songs was also interesting and different.

Accredited photographers were allowed to shoot 3 songs in front of stage. Light was from bright sunny to really dark. In mix lots of smoke (that I hate) and rain. So interesting challenges. Far more interesting challenge was rain. My D90 has no waterproofing. But I have one word for all of you that have same problem : ZIPLOCK BAGS ! I put tight fitting bag on camera body and my Nikon 70 – 200 mm was sticking out. Lens is totally weather proof and it did wear this test as advertised. At times there was pouring heavy rain on lens. Camera body did get some raindrops but all seem to work. Seems like humidity did not do any damage. But fact is that if I want to cover more outdoor concerts I need to get that D700 or D3.

My SlingShot LowePro bag was disappointment. It has rain cover that stopped heavy rain pouring into bag but everything in bag did get dump. Including my SB-900 strobe that was working but had condense water under reflector glass. It took several days to try up. I could not use lens cleaning cloth as it was moist. Next time I pack all things in camera bag in individual ziplock bags.

Very surprising was that Battery Packs lasted very well. I had one fully recharged Battery and one spear and after 2 days I had half power left in second one. After taking over 3000 frames.

Something has to be said about amount of frames I took. Over 3000 from that 1000 I deleted and from rest I uploaded 323 to my Gallery. Almost did not do any post processing on images but lots of sorting and selecting. I really need to start to make less images in order to spend less time for selection process. This time it took far too much time!

In conclusion to all photographers. You need to shoot rock concerts it is must do to, train yourself and get some interesting people images.

You can see my effort here.

Gary Numan

Tweeted Friday about this event and now I have a chance to write this post after photos are uploaded in album.

Well I am kinda old school strait jazz and blues  listener but over a few last years I do enjoy lots of different flavors of music. Good guitar music, funk tunes, all sorts of fusion even electronic jazz. Got to have a varaety of spicy flavors to live interesting life.

This time in NO99 was Gruuv Grupp that plays funk-rock from different eras (Mike Stern, Kenny Garretti, Jamaladeen Tacuma etc.)

Shame that there were so little of public. Guess lots of people left town ...it is spring after all. In public were other musicians and their friends, it seemed to me.

Music itself...I loved all of it. Really lifted spirits and charged battery with funk energy.

I generated almost 6 GB of material in my camera. Took a few short video clips also. So bellow are two samples. One is a still shot and another a short video clip. So what is the difference ? How still shot captures feeling and how video does the same (leave on side video's quality issue)?

Gruuv Grupp - Virgo Sillamaa