October

Let’s start with the concerts this time around. The last quarter of the year was actually a bit slow for me in terms of shooting music, but October saw me shoot a stellar (for photography, but musically as well) Ra Ra Riot show at the 9:30 Club. The top shot above isn’t sharp, but I love it anyway because of the cellist’s facial expression and the implied motion. Below that one is a shot of The Faceless opening for In Flames, also at the 9:30; typically for a metal band, the lighting for this set was almost entirely backlight, but at least it was colorful backlight, which allowed for some neat shots like this one. Also the mic-eating action is second to none here, ha.

A pretty major event for me this month was an enormous meet & greet at Sly Horse Studios, in which I got a lot of practice with my off-camera lighting techniques in shooting portraits. My favorite is this one of Amira and Edwin - a bunch of the shots I took of them look like they could be band promo photos, this one included.

On a different tack, I also went on my first backpacking trip of the year, but it ended up just being a day hike because the weather was so miserable that my friends’ dog wasn’t quite up for it. But snow-covered landscapes make for easy, beautiful photos, and I’m really happy with a bunch of what I got that day. I like the above shot because of the sense of scale it provides, tiny (but colorful) hikers lost amidst a forest of white and green.

Finally, I got a couple new toys, namely a pair of X-ray lenses with apertures of f/0.75 and f/1.0. These lenses have a bizarre and wonderful way of rendering reality when they’re slapped onto a DSLR (definitely not what they were originally meant for). The above shot isn’t Photoshopped at all other than increased contrast; the color rendition and smoothness is all part of the charm of these lenses.

The rest of the year after the jump!

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July

A bit slower this month, and once again not shooting much other than live music. The highlight was probably getting invited to shoot onstage with Jucifer, which produced a bunch of images like the top one above. Later, covering Atheist, I was again right in the middle of the action, this time without needing to be onstage, and got a bunch of fun shots of guitarist Chris Baker. But my favorite shot was this shot of the crowd at the very end of the show, taken from the back of the club with a simple 50/1.8.

Finally, shooting Wilco at Wolf Trap was a study in “do what you have to do to get the shot,” as I snuck in far closer to the stage than I was supposed to, studiously ignoring the usher looking my way, to grab this one shot of guitarist Nels Cline. It was the only worthwhile shot I got from the entire show.

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April

More concerts! I wasn’t shooting much else at this point in the year, and I don’t have too much to show from this month. What I did shoot are a couple more dynamic female leads: Katy Perry was energetic, charismatic and slightly crazy; this was a shot that none of the other eight or so photogs in the pit managed to capture, as Perry came leaping in from the opposite side of the stage as her band. Too bad the mic stand is in the way, but it doesn’t bother me enough to discount this shot as one of my favorites!

Later in the month, I got this shot of The Agonist’s Alissa White-Gluz, which has become my most-viewed image on Flickr, courtesy of Google. (A Google Image search of “The Agonist” or “Alissa White-Gluz” comes up with this image, or sometimes one of the others in the set, within the first few pages.)

Not much more to show off from April, but highlights from a very busy May and June are after the jump!

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January

The year started off slow, with one major exception: the Metallica show on the 15th was one of the best shows, photography-wise, I covered all year. I got couple memorable shots of Robb Flynn of openers Machine Head flinging water into the audience (and all over me), and then a boatload of portfolio-worthy shots just from the 20 minutes in the pit with Metallica.

A few days later, I volunteered as a photographer for a service event at which Oprah was filming a part of her show; Usher and MTV’s Kim Stolz were “reporting live” from the event. The whole thing was kind of bizarre but I learning something photographically: video hot lights look great, and make taking good pictures ridiculously easy.

And finally, there was the inauguration parade, in which Joe Biden decided to give me a unique shot (which, damn it, I did my best to botch by missing the focus). Thanks Joe!

February and March after the jump, and the rest of the year coming in subsequent posts!

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I took a lot of photos of concerts in 2008. Many of those concerts I wrote about here, and I’ve already posted most of my best shots here, so in this entry I’ll just post a few that I like that for one reason or another haven’t made it to the blog yet. A more comprehensive collection of my favorites from 2008 can be found in this Flickr set.

First, the band I shot most in 2008, Canada’s Unexpect (3 different shows, all at Jaxx). This was also the first time I brought my camera to a concert in 2008 and only the second time I’d shot a show since, oh, 2000 or so. So I was really, quite literally, starting from scratch when it came to concert photography. Definitely didn’t quite figure out what I was doing until a few months in - still working with a slow lens, slow shutter speeds, matrix metering, and aperture priority here, but I managed to get a couple decent shots, like this one:

After the jump, much, much more, including photos and a full list of bands and venues I shot in 2008.

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This will be a mostly “no words” post. I’m going to do a few “favorites of 2008″ type posts over the next few days, and I figured I’d start with my trip to the Beijing Olympics, since I never got around to actually blogging about it. Here’s the full set of my photos from that trip, but a select few of my favorites here:

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The above was taken right at midnight on New Year’s Eve and is my last photo in the Project 366 that had me taking a photo every single day of 2008. Done at last!

By one measure, I failed miserably at this project. By my count I missed at least 8 days (including a 9-day span in December where I missed 5 days), and that doesn’t include the fact that I kind of bent the rules to my advantage sometimes - in some cases using photos taken after midnight to count for the previous day, in other cases using them to count for the next day. I did not miss a single day in any way, shape or form until early August, but after that I completely fell off the tracks. More than just missing days, I also just lost inspiration, and the majority of my shots from September and later were totally rote “I’m taking a photo for the sake of taking a photo” shots taken at the end of the day. At that point I had completely stopped enjoying the project and probably should have quit altogether, but I was too stubborn for that.

By a totally different, and arguably more important, measure, the project was a resounding success. I originally embarked on it because my D70 had been collecting dust in my closet. I would take it out for parties, Ultimate tournaments and backpacking trips, but otherwise never touched it. This seemed like a giant waste since I’ve always loved taking photos (especially since getting my first SLR from my brother in 2000), so I was looking for some way to motivate myself to just get out and take more pictures. On that count, I succeeded way more than I could have possibly imagined. I took over 400 photos in the first week of 2008. I took 10,000 photos in the first three months (compared to 16,000 in the three and a half years preceding). And it only went up from there. I got my D300 in April and have put the shutter through some 40,000 actuations already.

A second goal was to actually improve my photography, and while this is subjective to a certain extent, I at least think that I’ve succeeded. I look at my photos from 2007 and before and cringe, which is a good sign. I am much more confident with a camera in my hands now that I’ll be able to get interesting photos of whatever it is I’m looking at. On a technical level, I’m also much more comfortable with the basics of exposure - I knew them intellectually before, but now I know them instinctively (shooting in manual and adjusting on the fly at concerts has helped immeasurably in this respect). I also am way more comfortable using flash than I’ve ever been, both on- and off-camera, though I still have plenty to learn here. Compositionally, it’s harder to pinpoint clear improvement, but I think I have a better eye than I did a year ago, and am just generally more perceptive.

Finally, and this was totally unexpected, I transformed myself into an event photographer. I discovered a real joy for concert photography, and am in the process of expanding this passion to other sorts of events - for instance, I’m scheduled to do my first wedding this May. I developed a pretty efficient workflow for processing massive numbers of images from concerts, sports events, newsworthy happenings and so on. I started building a brand for myself, with the website and blog, watermark, business cards, and so on, which has helped get me some gigs I definitely didn’t foresee at the beginning of the year. The upshot is that while a year ago I was contemplating sneaking my camera into a tiny club to shoot an obscure rock band (above, my Day 16 shot), this year, exactly 365 days after I took the photo above, my first concert shoot will be Metallica at the Verizon Center, a 20,000-seat arena.

An odd consequence of this development has meant that my more free-form “artistic” photography took a bit of a dive in the latter part of the year, when I was focusing most of my energy on live music photography. I got some great shots in the first few months of the year that I wouldn’t mind hanging in an art gallery (and I did, kind of, if you’d consider Artomatic that kind of thing), but in the latter part of the year most of my stuff was more documentary-style. I was doing much less of the “carry the camera everywhere and take pictures of any random thing that strikes my fancy” thing, and I’d actually like to get back to that a bit. I definitely did that during my trip to Beijing and it netted me some shots I really love, like my Day 234 photo:

Ironically, it was that trip to China, where I got tons of keepers, that hurt my photo-a-day the most. I had several thousand images to process after that trip, and while going through them I had absolutely no energy left over to take creative photos every day. (The jet lag certainly didn’t help.) I fell into a bit of a creative funk at that point and never fully recovered, choosing instead of focus my creativity in concert and other specific event shoots. It was at this juncture, too, that I started missing days here and there.

So starting in September I was kind of feeling like the project was drudgery, and I was taking crap photos just for the sake of taking photos. Not really the point of the project. Nevertheless, I’m glad I stuck it out, I’ve learned a ton, and I’ve rediscovered a passion for photography that certainly isn’t going anywhere. I just have to figure out how I want to channel it. I’m not doing a new 365 project in 2009 for obvious reasons, but I’m certainly going to figure out some goals for myself with regards to photography, and I think it’s going to be a fun year.