Skull Branded Pirates – Leeds Rios

Yarrgh. Tonight I attended a ‘pirate metal’ gig, that’s right; ‘pirates’ as in Jonny Depp / Orlando Bloom and ‘metal’ as in Metallica Iron Maiden.

Skull Branded Pirates - Leeds Rios - by chrisdearnleyphotography.com

I don’t really understand it as a concept, but the packed out Rios is testament to how popular this genre is.

Graham Wilson of Skull Branded Pirates

The conditions weren’t great for photos, but they rarely are for live music! The venue has its lighting rig set up behind the stage, rather then pointing at the stage, which I find strange as it meant the performers are silhouetted, even to the naked eye, so external flash (Canon Speedlite 430 EX) was used, with a Sto-Fen diffuser. I deviated between pointing the flash directly at the perfomers, and angling it slightly to bounce the light off of surfaces in the room.

Graham Wilson of Skull Branded Pirates

For the on-camera settings, I left the camera on manual for most of the gig and set the shutterspeed to 1/60 and waited, poised, for moments of pirate metal magic. I shot quite a few without the flash, relying only on the ambient light. They didn’t come out so well, but made reasonable black and white conversions.

Leeds Rios - photographed by chrisdearnleyphotography.com

sea monster?

Skull Branded Pirates were thoroughly entertaining, they even had a large sea monster on stage.

Skull Branded Pirates

Check them out on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/skullbrandedpirates
You can also view the rest of the set of photos at my flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdearnley/