This past weekend marked my two year anniversary as a concert photographer. I got my first press pass for Forbidden Fruit Festival in Dublin and shot the entire weekend as the ‘semi-official’ photographer for the festival. That was extremely lucky and opened up a lot of doors for me — I will go into that later. In the next few paragraphs I’m going to go through the things I wish I knew when I was starting out and hopefully help to inspire some new photographers to get into this exciting and rewarding genre of photography.

Warpaint at Forbidden Fruit 2014, Dublin

You really don’t need the best equipment

I’ll start this off by telling you a bit about my kit and what’s in my camera bag. It’s pretty basic (an understatement) and hasn’t changed much in the past two years unfortunately but I feel it has made my photography a lot better. I’m constantly being restricted by the limitations of my camera and lenses but the more I use it the more I learn and I feel like it’s making me a better photographer. All the photos you will see on this page would have been taken on my beat up Nikon D90 and a couple of lenses including the Nikkor 50mm f1.8, Tokina 11–16mm f2.8 and the Nikkor 70–300mm f4–5.6. There are also a couple of lenses I borrow every now and then which are the Nikkor 35mm f1.8 and the Nikkor 10.5mm f2.8. Top-tip: If you’re starting out and have friends who have DSLR’s, always buy the same brand as them so you can beg, borrow and steal lenses from them when you need them!

Nikon D90

Develop a style

As I said, my set up is pretty basic and as you can see above, it has been used a lot over the past number of years but don’t let an old camera and basic equipment ever hold you back. It was pretty daunting the first time I walked into a photo pit at a festival and seeing everyone with multiple camera bodies and lenses the length of my forearm. I’m sure their camera straps cost more than the second hand 50mm f1.8 lens I was using but at the end of the day, it’s the photos that do the talking and not the equipment. Old shitty cameras only make your photography better. That’s the main thing I’ve learned for sure. I’ve been stressed out by blurry or dark photos, photos that are way to grainy to be useable and shots that I’ve missed because my autofocus couldn’t handle the lighting and movement. Like most people I blamed my camera and lenses but I knew I had to keep shooting even though I didn’t have the ‘ideal’ camera and set up for music photography. One day it clicked — I can’t take the amazingly sharp and beautifully lit photos when it’s dark like the rest of the guys in the photo pit so I changed my approach to suit my camera and it’s limitations: I’m going to take dark, moody photos and focus on composition to make the photo interesting. I would over-expose the image slightly and in Lightroom I would bring down the exposure and shadows which would cancel out some of the noise from my small, old sensor. This helped me develop my style and see photos no one else shot.