Forty thousand voices and an impossible amount of light. Shooting Coldplay meant working inside a machine built to feel intimate at stadium scale, and stealing the handful of frames where the spectacle held still long enough to be photographed.

From the side of the stage you see how the trick works. The catwalk thrusts out into the crowd, lit underneath in ribbons of blue, and the band just walks the length of it like the whole arena is a living room. Pink smoke off to one side, a sea of wristbands blinking in the dark, and right in the middle of all of it the singer in a star-spangled shirt at the mic, an acoustic slung on, looking weirdly small and weirdly enormous at the same time.

The job is finding the calm inside the noise. Everything is moving, lights strobing, forty thousand phones up, the rig overhead never holding still for two seconds. So you wait. You wait for the beat where the band freezes mid-song and the lights all point the same way and the spectacle accidentally composes itself, and you take that frame before the machine starts moving again.