July/August 2025 Newsletter - How to prepare for a band gig #1

2 extremely busy and exciting months, many festival and venue gigs that featured everything from rock to jazz to symphony orchestras.

I worked another 3 epic headliner festival shows for The Minds of 99 - there are several posts on my Instagram, so I will just show you one mad view here:

I worked for Danish superstar MØ at her huge Roskilde Festival headliner gig at the Arena stage. I love the moment when the artist walks on stage and the crowd goes crazy:

I documented School of X playing an incredible daytime show. I dislike daylight at outdoor festival concerts but in a tent it is really not too bad, you get a built in soft fill light.

I worked for Soleima when she played a banging fantastic midnight show:

Roskilde Festival is 7 days with 3 ‘warm-up’ days before the 4 main days. In these warm-up days upcoming Nordic artists get to play for a massive festival crowd so these are super important concerts for these artists, they might struggle to sell 500 tickets to their own shows in small venues but here they get to reach 10,000+ people and it can be a real turning point in their careers. These concerts can therefore be really fun to work, here is ØSTEN that I worked for on a lovely Summer evening:

With many big band jobs compressed into just a few weeks, 4 of them were 4 days in a row, I had to do a lot of planning! So I thought it would be a nice time to kick-off this series where I will take you through what I do to prepare, what I do at the concert, all the way to delivery of the pictures!

I don’t do every step for every gig but, so just take what you can use from how I do it and discard the rest! I just feel that I am working for bands that have spent months rehearsing and preparing so the least I can do is be equally well prepared! I find it relaxes me and makes me more creative during the shoot because I am on top of everything, I am not suddenly missing a guitarsolo or something because I didn’t prepare enough and was in the wrong spot during big moments.

You have been booked for your first band gig, yessss! So exciting! So nervewracking! What do you do now? Have no fear, preparation and information will save you! :)

Get as much info as you can! This is super important for me, I want to know as much as possible about the show.

Set-list is a minimum, but not enough. Ask for a script / shownotes too, so you know all the big moments to be aware of, could be solos, features, crowd surf, pyro, front singer goes into the pit or crowd, etc, you want to know everything. If it’s a festival show, there will probably be some IMAG-notes for the festival’s IMAG (jumbo screen) producer, these are super handy to have too.

Production rehearsal video. Not all bands do this, but if they have a full video recording of the final full production rehearsal, ask if you can have it. I find it is so nice to have the setlist open and just add notes while watching the video. More on this later.

Schedule for the gig day. This ensures you know at what time get-in is, when does the band arrive, sound-check, dinner, doors and showtime.

Logistics and transport. This obviously varies a lot depending on if you are just at a local venue or going to a festival gig further away. If you are traveling with the band or crew, make sure you get all of this arranged and scheduled in the week leading up to the gig. On gig day you want to be fully focused on photography not transport!

You have your info, now it is time for building your own script for how you want to cover the show!

A setlist with notes is basically what you are making. You can do this on a piece of paper or in any note app, or if you are me: Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are awesome for organisation and it is easy to edit on the phone too on the day - but use whatever works for you. These shooting scripts can be super simple or very detailed, especially when I manage phototeams and have a team of photographers who each get their own script. Here are 2 examples, a simple version and a complex version from a 2 hour Arena concert with lots of things happening, features, b-stage etc.

If I have a production rehearsal video I will watch the whole show and make my notes, or just read the script/shownotes from the band and make my plan accordingly.

The scripts tell me where I want to be during the concert for the various songs to make sure I am in the best position for every big moment, so I can capture them all for the artist. This script becomes much more important in large venues where moving around takes a long time so you can’t just improvise everything, you can’t just sprint from the back of the venue to the pit because you forgot that there is a crowd surf happening. Sometimes it is a venue I know very well, sometimes a venue or festival I don’t know at all, so scouting on the day becomes super important. We will dive into that next time!

I love using spreadsheets, it is so easy and fast to make these, I use coloured cells to tell me what I am doing for each song, easier to see during a show. Red is usually pit, green is stage, foh/venue is blue and then sometimes extra colours for b-stage and other bits. I just want something that is easy to decode on my phone during the show, ideally I will have memorised the script but during the action of a concert it is amazing what one can suddenly forget!

I will talk more about the shooting script next time because I make adjustments on the day during sound rehearsal. And I am can always break or change it during the concert. But it is so good to have a starting point and have those big moments down and set, so I can rest assured I will be in position for them.

I find it actually frees me up and relaxes me, I know which songs where I need to be in specific spots, and other songs where I am free to improvise and go with what I feel in the moment.

In late June I did 5 big band jobs in 6 days at 2 different festivals and the only way this worked was having everything 100% prepared so that everyday I just opened a new schedule and spreadsheet and I was ready (after a lot of coffee!).

Ok…now we are fully prepared, stay tuned for next month where we pack our gear and arrive at the venue!

That is all for this month, I aim to be back in a month with part 2 of how to work for a band and not fall off the stage :) Thank you for reading, feel free to share this with anyone, and comment or send me suggestions and questions. See you next month!