Be prepared for anything

Stage-photography is exactly as exciting, nerve-wrecking, hilarious, wonderful, scary and beautiful, as what the performer feels when he or she enters the stage. You are totally at the mercy of this flow, and you can never be sure of the outcome.

Anything can happen on stage. And just as anything can happen ON stage, just imagine what can happen OFF stage, where you are standing. 

A year ago I was shooting a big event in Stockholm and I was crammed into the stage-pit with other photographers. To shoot a concert with multiple artists, you have to have patience, a LOT to drink, great back and knees, and a bladder the size of a water melon. Five hours into the show, everything in your body hurts. Your ears are bleeding, your back is no more, and your knees, let’s not even go there. Apparently that was just the beginning. Suddenly one the artists in the Jedward duo felt like doing a stage dive. And in the fashion of Jedward, he did, without thinking, throwing himself off the stage, landing on me and my camera in the stage-pit in front of the audience. The stage-guards gasped, helped him up on his feet and back on the stage, then patting my shoulder and asked me if I was okay. I felt like a cartoon from a Bugs Bunny movie. For all Jedward fans out there I can say that he was warm, sweaty, sticky of stage makeup and smelled like hairspray. But kind of cute.