Snap – a strong, simple way

In the final instalment in our series on 2020’s best photographs from The Dominion Post’s five Wellington visual journalists, we turn the lens back on Kevin Stent.

This was the Benee concert at Shed 6. I didn’t know what to expect, being a boomer. I’d never even heard of her and didn’t particularly care for it at first. As with any concert, we had three songs to shoot. She’s quite whimsical on stage. She kept pulling all these quirky faces, so I was just concentrating on shooting that, but then all of a sudden she just rocked out, which I didn’t expect. She just crouched down and shook. She went crazy for a few seconds. It was good to get something sharp, because using slower shutter speeds it’s often a struggle. With music photographs the light is all over the place, so there’s a bit of luck involved. You can be on certain settings and then it bursts and you get all sorts of exposures. So you just shoot the s--- out of it.

This was the fire which incinerated 128 Abel Smith St. What I like about this is that we never, hardly ever, get to fires when there’s still flames. We go to so many callouts as news photographers, and we’re almost cynical about going to fires because we always get there and there’s just smoke, the flames have already been. And citizen journalists have got photos of full flames. So we were just fortunate that we had a tip from a workmate as soon as it started. I arrived just as the fire crews arrived, and I was able to get pretty close before everyone was shoved away. The thing was just in full flight. It doesn’t look that close, but I’ve got a wide-angle lens on the camera. It’s nice to go to a news job where it’s all still happening. Too often we’re too late. We get a lot of grief for a lot of jobs. The fire service are always really helpful with us, to a point. They’re safety-conscious, but they’re helpful. The fact this was a well-known central city building made it quite a big story for us on the night it happened. It was literally only two minutes away from the office, but it’s more than a block’s walk, so I drove. I had lots of gear. When we got there – I had a journalist with me – we parked in a really dodgy spot. I asked the journalist to keep an eye on the car, and then I forgot about her. It’s always just good to be there for news. I remember a gnarly old press photographer once telling me that the first rule of photography is being there. Just be there. You’re just shooting it as it happens. Photographers like this stuff because we don’t get much of it.

I would’ve taken hundreds of photos in those three songs. In a lot of the first photos I took she was silhouetted behind curtains, so it was good when she burst out and did that. I don’t even know how old she is, and I didn’t know what type of music she made – I still don’t. I Googled her afterwards. I ended up quite enjoying it, actually. But there’s not enough guitar in her music for me. This was the first concert I’d done in a while. The three songs go by really quick, you’re just trying to get as much content as you can. The band can relax when the cameras are gone because they haven’t got the long lenses on them any more. They can pick their noses without being caught. I did once have the misfortune of going to Guns N’ Roses a couple of years ago and Axl Rose gave me the finger.