I started shooting photographs of bands around 1970. I had a good friend Alan James in a wild band called Storm based in Dunedin New Zealand. I would shoot photographs and 8mm movies of the band. My equipment and technique was terrible and the images were poor.

Left image: Dunedin band, Storm 1970 - The infamous fire incident that banned them from Dunedin City Council Venues. Sanderson is mobbed on stage, James sets fire to his Fender Stratocaster guitar.

The images are screen grabs from a lost poor quality standard 8mm movie.

Experiment photographing with with infrared B&W film and Alan James with his flaming Fender Stratocaster guitar, Dunedin 1970

From here my equipment and technique improved and I began to shoot international acts.

While the highest rating of colour slide film at this time was 100 ISO, the images I shot in this period with 35mm transparency film rate as high as 860 ISO and pushed processed or 1800 ISO and cross processed. Kodak would not process the film as they said it was impossible to uprate Ektachrome, so I had to find friendly private labs like Colour True who were please to oblige for a cost. These have proved to be some of the first and few images shot in colour of concerts in New Zealand. I wrote an article on up rating which was published in Australian Photography Jan 1980.

Many of the images were shot on a Nikkormat with a f2.8 - 135mm lens. Most photographers of the time shooting night performances worked in B&W which was easier to up rate and process. Because of the slow shutter speeds used, many of the images I shot had a sense of blur and movement as in this image on the left of Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.

Deliberately shooting to gain this sense of movement became central to the work but created a challenge, especially with film, and demanded shooting lost and editing. Many images simply did not work.

But the few images that did work had an extra dimension that illuded many other photographers shooting musicians at the time. This out of focus blur became a signature of the work that I strived for, and one I continued to explore in later years of shooting bands.

Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin 1973 shot with Nikkormat with a f2.8 - 135mm lens Ektachrome 100 rated to 640 ASA

In the 1970s I also experimented with slow shutter speeds and blur in daylight performances,as in this image of Rick Parfitt, Status Quo.

From shooting the Led Zeppelin concert I met promotor Robert Raymonds who gave me a pass to get back stage for the Ngaruawahia Music Festival - 1973 Raymonds selected the best images of Zeppelin and Ngaruawahia for a book he was planning - the book never eventuated - the images disappeared.

Since 2005 I have begun to shot more material mainly at Womad with a 13 mega pixel Fuji S3 Pro with a 70 200mm lens and then a Canon 5D II digital camera with a 100 - 400mm lens to add to this archive.

As mentioned I have continued to explore movement and dynamitic gestalt within the frame where the framing is orientated to visual elements within the subject not the vertical horizontal axis. The intention is to extenuate the sense of movement and dynamic force within the performer.