Those lyrics are of course from Death Cab For Cutie’s song ‘The New Year’ from their legendary Transatlanticism album. It sums up what I feel about the stupid New Years Eve hype. My last gig of 2025 was on 30th Dec and my first this year was Jan 4th, so really, nothing stops or changes, no different, time continues. But it’s as a good time as any to look back and reflect. Also, not entirely true, I do feel different and better, I am in way better shape after really getting back into bike riding almost 2 years ago and also finally being successful in removing 90% of my alcohol intake half a year ago, yessss, big personal victory. Besides continually improving my photography, and especially color grading and design skills, my goal for this year is to travel with my bike. I have been to a lot of places in the world where I’d love to revisit but I want to bring my Canyon endurace bike everywhere!
I am so grateful to all the bands and venues that have booked me this past year, it has been my best year ever as a music photographer. Truly, a dream come true! I worked somewhere around 120 gigs in 2025, although that number does not really mean anything in itself as some of those jobs are 2-3 hours and some of them lasts several days.
The Minds of 99 festival tour was a huge highlight of the year, it was an absolutely fantastic tour. I also really enjoyed getting to work much more with color grading and design creating all the SoMe posts. It was really exciting to not just make the stills but take them all the way to the finished product, with grade, texture, design, layout etc. Here is a few of them:
The pictures have a unique grade, grain and texture that I designed for the 2024&2025 concerts for the band. For SoMe, the idea was to release a magazine style post after each concert. Over the 7 festivals on the tour, I made 107 of these ‘magazine cover’ pictures for the band and management to choose from and then 500+ ‘magazine pages’ with either single or double pictures. It is a big extra task after each concert but it is also extremely fun and gratifying!
Most of them developed and created in hotel rooms and tour vans and ferries. After creating the initial design, the real trick was then creating a workflow that was easy, quick, efficient so I wouldn’t end up spending 3 days after each concert. I learned some neat tricks about conditional actions in Photoshop so I could use the Image Processor feature and just point it to a folder of exported jpegs and it would grade and texture them all automatically. I might dive deeper into this in a newsletter, let me know if you have any questions.
I can’t wait to show everyone what we are working on for the 2026 Arena tour, stay tuned!
December was not quite as mad busy as Sep-Oct-Nov was, but had some really nice gigs and time also for a lovely 7 day Christmas holiday with my family. Here are a few of my favourites from December.
This originally ran as a 4 part series over the past 5 months, and concluded last month. I have now turned this into a single (long!) article on my website, so it is an easily accessible ressource. The article also features a bonus section with additional info and you can find it here: How I prepare for a concert working for a band.
I just realised that I started this newsletter a year ago, so this is (I think) the 12th issue. Hmm, maybe I should start numbering them :) I hope to do some more deep dives like the ‘how I prepare for a concert’ series and as always, would love your comments, ideas, suggestions, requests etc :)
Thank you for reading, feel free to share this with anyone, and comment or send me suggestions and questions.
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