The Situation Where Being A Good Photographer Helps You Make Good Concert Photos
What happens when the lights don’t come up, the fog machine is obstructing your view, and you have 9 minutes to make a handful of usable images for your editors?
You find out if you’re a good photographer or not.
First off I have to start off this post by saying Mount Kimbie put on a great show and as someone who had never heard their music before I really enjoyed it and respected the art and craft behind it.
All that aside, covering their show was one of those assignments that would have given me cold sweats if I was a young photojournalist just starting out. While it’s not uncommon for a musical act to start off with some back lighting or the lights down. This typically only lasts no more than the first song and rarely that long.
In 2022 I photographed the Weeknd at Soldier Field. As is the case with most concerts, photographers get the first-three songs to make their images and then are shooed away. The Weeknd came out and his first two songs had him back lit and surrounded by smoke from fog machines for almost two-full songs. There was quite a bit of complaining going on in the press area after the three songs. The younger photographers were just a gasp that they couldn’t really get anything. And a few of the veteran-concert photographers were just short of yelling at the media liaison, trying to get back out there to get more usable photos.
I was totally satisfied with what I got because the story was going to be as much about the elaborate stage and experience and less about a close up of Abel Tesfaye who is The Weeknd.
Back to Mount Kimbie
It was clear 15-minutes into the show that the lighting style was not going to change. While I had been able to shoot from off to the side of the stage, I knew the band was all about letting their music speak for itself and any kind of theatrical performance or show wasn’t going to be happening. So, I dropped into art school mode and started trying to make dynamic pictures using the silhouettes of the band.
From the side of the stage I was able to get some images of the band’s faces, but it involved timing the lights, manually focusing in the dark, and just luck that their eyes would be open.
In the end I was lucky that Mount Kimbie wasn’t a larger musical act with a pit bull media handler. I wasn’t ushered out after 3 songs and had a little more time to stick around and make images. So much of what I shot that night was deleted once I finished editing. There were countless frames where I was just holding the shutter button waiting for the lights to pop long enough to capture a face. I’d say I shot about 1,200 frames, of which 450 are still in my archive.
