Thoughts on being a concert photographer + Dakh Daughters

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that it would be nice to work a concert photographer. Somehow it happened that many of my friends in some ways are connected with music. And because I didn't have any natural musical talent, I show my love for music through photography. And I also love live music. And taking pictures of musicians (not only on the stage). But this is the 'bright' side of it. There is always a dark side, like it happened with Annie Leibovitz. Because of constant tours with The Rollings Stones, she became dependent on drugs along with the musicians (thank God she left in the past). Of course, I wouldn't like to travel with such band, but sometimes job happens. And I'm not sure I would love to do it as 'job' yet. But, I still can enjoy the 'bright' side of concert photography, that's why this time I'm showing you Ukrainian freak-cabaret band 'Dakh Daughters'.

Long live the FANES!

Yesterday was the 2th anniversary of Kyiv indie acoustic-electro band FANES, whose lead singer, Elvin Kristian, I got to know exactly that period of time ago. And I saw it as a nice opportunity to show you the pictures we did together back in June, a day or two beforemy trip to Poland,and week or two before his trip to the U.S.,  on an extremely cold and rainy day. There is no such thing as bad weather for a photographer, right?
The was no way we could postpone it, 'cos we thought we wouldn't see each other for a few months (Elvin is still in the U.S., so we were right), that's why we decided to go for it no carrying for the weather.
Elvin and his friend performed at my personal little photo exhibition back in 2013, and I they saved that evening, I believe :) I am very happy to have someone I can share my artistic worries with, and someone who trusts me with my crazy ideas, usually incomparable with health.
Long live the FANES!

Ilona Volianyk acoustic concert , Kyiv

Since the early age I was interested in music but because of family circumstances and dance classes I wasn't able to attend music school and my dream remained unfulfilled. That's why I'm so in love with music photography, if you can say so :) And I'd love to go on tour to diarize it with Jason Mraz or Alyssa Bernal or some other amazing musicians :)
Here's my friend Ilona Volianyk performing in Kyiv at charity acoustic concert. 

Illusion

Today I want to present you my debute photography work in music sphere , the new album cover of EP 'Illusion' by Ilona Volianyk, my good friend and incredibly talanted musician (she is on the photo).
When Ilona proposed me to work together I was very happy and agreed immediately not only because we had a lack of time, but also because I'm really into music and everything music-related and that was my dream for a really long time to create a music album  cover and to work with musicians.
 Ilona is a pleasure to work with. She is a very solid, responsible and creative artist. She knows what she wants and with all her work she want to send messages to people and to be understood. She has a special idea for the album and she wanted it to be showen not only through the songs but alsothrough the album cover. We had few meetings and discussed different variants and at the end made 2 very crazy photoshots. One of the results is presented here, and another will appear later for the posters
I'll give links for Ilona's album once it comes out.

Concert shooting

Recently I've been shooting concerts and events a lot, which is nice because I like journalistic photography a lot, you know that. But another sweet thing about this is that I was mostly shooting my good friends and great band '7th Step' and even went to another city for shooting their concert.  A great part of what inspires me I get watching musicians' vlogs on YouTube. All these tour-life-things and meeting with other musicians and collaborations are very exciting and I often think why photographers can't do the same things. It's all about art and aims, that unites people, isn't it? That's what I want my vlog to be about, in the nearest future.