The Eden Sessions are always hugely popular with photographers so, in nine years of gigs, we have built up a fantastic collection of pictures. Every now and again though one stands head and shoulders above the others and this year our favourite shot so far is this amazing image by Paul Williams of the St. Austell Voice.

Mika at the Eden Sessions by Paul Williams

Paul says: “I’ve taken thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of gig photographs at Eden. They’ve ranged from an out-of-sorts Amy Winehouse, a languid and complex Rufus Wainright, a petulant, moody Liam Gallagher as well as other icons such as The Verve, Doves, Kasabian, Snow Patrol, Paul Weller, Jack White, the wonderful Florence and the Machine, Peter Gabriel, James Morrison, Lily Allen, Mark Ronson and many many more.

“Since taking the Mika shot I’ve been very flattered by the almost unilateral praise for the picture. Phill, my editor, recognised it as a very special shot and I’m eternally grateful that he took the decision to use it almost full page in the gig coverage. From a technical standpoint, it is the best shot that I’ve ever taken of a gig and
here’s why:

“Mika came out of the traps like a greyhound! He never stays still and bounds around with endless energy and enthusiasm. I noticed during the second number that he was jumping in the air with his legs tucked up behind him. This to me was going to be the shot.

“On his stage set I did notice a large clockface-style projected image that would make the perfect backdrop but for this to look right the shutter speed wouldn’t be short enough to freeze Mika in mid-air.

“So I resorted to an age-old sports photography technique and quirk of physics. What canny sports shooters did in the old days was to wait for the ‘peak of the action’. Putting it another way, for a split second when an ascent turns into a descent, there’s momentary pause, only for a fraction of a second. That exact moment enables the photographer to capture a scene using a far slower shutter speed than normal.

“I waited and saw Mika head for that part of the stage. I switched to spot metering (measuring a tiny part of the frame) and chose a long shutter speed to capture the background image. He then began his leap and instead of just squeezing the shutter I delayed and got two frames a split second later as he peaked. One was not quite framed properly, the other was smack on.

“For the technical anoraks out there. here’s what I used: Nikon D700 full frame digital SLR with a Nikon 70-200 F2.8 lens on manual focus. I spot metered at ISO 1250 using a shutter speed of 1/60th second at F2.8. I didn’t use RAW I shot in high resolution JPEG and chose ‘cloudy’ as a white colour balance.”