I don't listen to Metal music as I used to do when I was younger (much younger), over the years I started to prefer other different genres, but occasionally I still listen to a few metal bands (especially the album No More Tears by Ozzy Osbourne, after all these years I still think is one of the best metal albums written in history, if not the best), and one of them is Mastodon. Also as a music photographer I know that metal gigs they rarely let you down in terms of performance of the show, especially lights. You probably get the best out of Glam-rock/metal bands, or guitar heroes, people with a huge ego essentially, where it's as bright, or brighter, than pop acts.
So when I saw they were coming to play in Dublin I didn't think twice before asking for a photo pass, as you can easily imagine.

And more or less they didn't really disappointed me, they really are a great live band and I guess you could hardly find a disappointed fan in the extremely packed venue.

Also it was a while since I shoot in the Academy, well yeah I did a couple of gigs, but only in the other room in the basement, which it isn't exactly the best venue to shoot a gig. But I saw that they finally renewed they lighting system, bringing tons of lights (even if unfortunately most of them are LED lights, one of the most hated source of lights from music photographers), which is always good. The gig itself, as a photographer point-of-view was good, maybe a bit darker than I was expecting, but still good. The band was pretty cool to photograph as they move a lot on stage, giving us a lot of good opportunities for a great shot. The only problems we had was that maybe the lights were a bit too reddish and greenish, and the fact that the drummer was nearly impossible to photograph, unless you had a very long focal length lens, like a 135mm or a 200mm so you could frame is face surrounded by his drums, but for these small/medium size venues I never bring long lenses so I concentrate my shots on the front men. If you are I-always-bring-my-supertele-to-gigs guy this time you probably have a good reason to bring that type of lenses if you want to have a photo of the drummer, otherwise I don’t see the point of using it. But that’s just a personal taste to be fair.

Anyway, down here you can find some of the best photos I took that night, while here you can find the full set on my flickr account.