Lee Goldup Photographer   Origin: Cardiff, Wales, UK   Links: leegoldup.com	Around nine years ago I was given my first SLR camera by my Dad. After playing around with it for a few months I decided I’d like to take it to a show and take photos of a live band. It was February 2000 and I had tickets for an upcoming H2O show (my favourite band at the time) at the Corporation in Sheffield. I knew that I’d need some kind of pass to be able to gain access behind the barrier to shoot the band properly. Firstly I approached the promoter and then the venue, and finally got a photo-pass for the show. Unfortunately it’s not always that easy. After this show I was totally hooked and took my camera along to every show I went to. For smaller venues I’d just walk in with it, but for larger ones I’d have to contact the promoter and/or venue in advance to get a photo-pass. Sometimes I would tell the venue I was working for a magazine, as they don’t always give you one if you just tell them it’s for your portfolio or website. As time went on it became easier to gain access to venues using the contacts I had made. After a while bands started to contact me asking if they could use my live shots for their websites or MySpace pages. I was even asked to go to shows that they were playing to take live shots of them, which lead to being approached for press shots. As time went on I started to become more recognised within the South Wales scene. I was approached by local magazines Buzz and Kruger to do work for them. The live features in Buzz included Kings of Leon, Gallows, The Police and Winehouse to name a few. Feature pieces for Kruger included Foals, Future of the Left etc. In December 2006 a good friend’s band The New 1920 were asked to do a European tour with Lostprophets. I went along to the first four UK dates to capture live and backstage shots. They then joined up with The Blackout and shared a tour bus around France, Belgium and Germany. I joined them in Germany and continued to capture footage of both bands for the remainder of the tour. After this tour I became good friends with The Blackout and was asked by them to do some press shots in early 2007. These shots were used for tour promotion that summer and have since been printed in national magazines. Throughout 2007 I became closer friends with another local band Kids In Glass Houses and began to cover more of their live shows. In February 2008 they went out on tour with Paramore and New Found Glory and asked me to go along with them to document a few days of the tour. Following on from this I took shots of them at a live acoustic show in Cardiff and had my first piece printed in Kerrang magazine. I was then asked to go out on their two week UK tour with US band Valencia in May of this year. During the tour the band had an in-store at HMV in Cardiff which I photographed; these shots were also published. Early this year I was asked to cover this years Give It A Name festival. This involved two days of shooting bands on two different stages, capturing the action at the signing tent, backstage and generally covering the event. It was a great experience. All in all meeting and knowing the right people is very important. You need to build good relationships and making good impressions. Getting in with magazines is extremely difficult due to the amount of photographers out there. You have to be prepared to give up a lot of your own time, do work for free and give shots away, sometimes without credit. It’s all about perseverance.