Kane Hibberd, known to fans as Kanye Lens, is one of Australia’s most in-demand music photographers. Having served as Soundwave’s official pap for years, he’s shot for countless bands and his work has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone twice.
But it’s an image he shot of Violent Soho during one of their recent WACO Tour performances that recently caught the attention of the internet. The image was taken during the band’s set at Melbourne’s Forum Theatre last week.
“It’s just a weird image and you just don’t see a lot of those shots,” Hibberd told The Music of the image, an aerial shot taken from inside the Forum Theatre, depicting Soho celebrating onstage before a rowdy sold-out crowd.
The image has racked up more than 6,000 likes on Violent Soho’s Facebook page alone and has been shared all over Facebook and Twitter, with just about everyone commenting on its almost otherworldly quality and the energy it managed to capture.
“People use drones and things like that in video now, but you can’t really use them inside and you don’t really see stills like that. As soon as you see it, you’re kind of like, ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ and then trying to figure it out,” said Hibberd.
“You want a photo to be engaging and I think people are so used to flicking through, but when you see something like that and it actually makes people stop and they start looking at it and go, ‘How is this done?’”
According to The Music, the crafty photog took the image by mounting a camera to one of the ancient theatre’s lighting trusses. The camera was then triggered remotely by a camera Hibberd was using to take shots on the ground.
Every time Hibberd took a photo, the aerial camera would do likewise, and the photographer himself can in fact be spotted in the photo if you look closely.
“I’ve got photos from the night before where I got kneed in the head by a stage diver – I just didn’t see it coming,” said Hibberd. “I can zoom in from the overhead camera and see the guy hit me and then me sort of fall back from it, which is kind of cool.”
We were lucky enough to speak to Hibberd back in June last year. He took us into the story of how he became one of Australia’s most sought-after music photographers, the intense amount of planning that goes into his work, and how it’s still hard to make a living as a creative.
