Posted April 22, 2023
Last Tuesday I had the chance to shoot a rock concert alongside my friend Mark White, who’d been hired by the band; Mark invited me along as a second photographer and to let me try my chops at shooting a show.
I’d only shot one show before, back in 2019 in Chicago; at some point I might put up a blog post about that, especially as the lead singer, a friend of mine, passed away this year. This was a somewhat different animal in a couple of ways. For one thing, Mark was getting paid, and though I was operating on my usual volunteer basis I felt the professional onus to do well. Secondly, unlike my first one four years ago, I’d be shooting this show in color. (At least, that was the original instruction.)
Side note: it’s easy to shoot rock shows in black and white. In color you’re plunged into tub-wrestling with weirdly tinted stage lights, your white balance gives up and goes home, and editing every photo is an exercise in salvaging some dripping narration from a deep sea of psychedelia. It took me three straight evenings across the rest of week to finish 110 photos to send Mark.
The band in question was a six-man Rolling Stones tribute band called Gimme Shelter (web page: http://rsconcertexperience.com), and they were playing at a casino in Kingston, which entailed leaving work an hour and a half early to meet Mark for the ferry transit and long drive. I’ll spare my readers a description of the strange hell that is a casino, with zombifed humans IV’d into jangling cartoony slot machines as far as the eye can see; some of you might theoretically enjoy such places. Thankfully a discreet black curtain in one wall led to a different room for the band: a small nightclub-style room of shallow levels in a rough octagon shape, with round tables, chairs along the railings, and an open dance floor in front of a raised stage. As Mark set up his lights I prowled around the space with a photographer’s eye, scoping out the best angles.
The lights were for the first event, taking a band photo. It was my first exposure to an actual tribute band; the six middle-aged men vanished into costumes and wigs, and damn if I wasn’t suddenly looking at Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. The casino hosts a “Throwback Tuesday” with a cycle of tribute bands including Blondie, Aerosmith, etc; I had an interesting talk with Paul (their “Mick”) about the vocalist challenges of mimicking different singers (he’s also in a Beatles tribute band). A window on a strange part of the music world I’d never seen.
And let me say right here that Gimme Shelter flat-out rocked. Once the show started I was concentrating too hard on photography to pay much attention, but every once in a while I had to stop still, jig in place along with a supercharged “Let’s Spend the Night Together” or something, and applaud with the rest of the house. If you have a chance to check these guys out I highly recommend it.
Within the sea of sound I was plunged into a manic frenzy of photography, circling back and forth around the room seeking the best angles, squeezing around the edges of the thrashing (middle-aged) dance floor to get to the other side, trying not to step on patrons’ toes or block their view for too long. My “task” was to get long shots of the band while Mark concentrated on closeups, but we each wound up doing a little of each, and I tried to get some shots highlighting each individual performer as well as general stage-energy shots.
I shot with two cameras around my neck. On my E-M1 II I had the Olympus 75 f1.8, and on the E-PL8 the 45 f1.8. I’m kicking myself because I never thought to pull out my wide-angle lens for closeups; Mark took some of those and they came out looking great. Of course shows are an exercise in shooting in the dark: I was at f1.8 on both lenses all night long, and my ISO fluctuated between 3200 and 6400. With a little “denoise” in Lightroom the photos came out fine; kudos again to micro four thirds, but it would be nice to shoot one of these with a full-frame camera sometime.
All in all it was a late night, a fun show, a crazy photographic challenge and a foray into the far wilds of editing color photos to capture rock-and-roll energy.
Oh, and Mark told me I could make some images black-and-white.
See what you think below.
