Last Sunday, one of the biggest hip-hop festivals in the country took place in suburban Minneapolis: Shakopee, MN to be exact. Soundset Festival drew 20,000 fans and hip-hop groups from around the country, although local talent - including headliner Atmosphere, Brother Ali, the Doomtree crew and more - shared the spotlight equally with big-name national acts like De La Soul (pictured above) and Big Boi.

Shooting the fest was a mixed bag. On the one hand, I love shooting outdoor festivals. The lighting is obviously a breeze, but there’s also a certain vibe that goes with these festivals that’s always fun. On the other hand, Soundset offered a few challenges. A lot of the acts involved a DJ way in the back of the stage and a single MC rapping up front. These guys (and almost all of them were guys) were invariably expressive, but there was little in the way of onstage interplay to make my photos interesting. When the exceptions came up - De La Soul, Doomtree, Slaughterhouse, to name a few - I tried to make the most of it, but an extremely high stage made compositions involving multiple musicians a challenge.

Logistically, while Soundset’s stages were too close together, all pouring music into the same surprisingly small piece of land, pit access to the main stage was a nightmare. There was one side of the stage that was very easy to get to; of course, photographers weren’t allowed in on that side. On the other side, we had to push through 10-20 feet of packed-in crowd space just in order to reach the barricade. Naturally, that was the side we were required to use to access the pit. So every time a new act came on the main stage, it was time to push and shove through the crowd. Not a huge deal, but definitely an annoyance, and one that should have been easily remedied for everyone’s sake.

That said, I don’t have much to complain about. The weather was beautiful (it was supposed to rain but never did), the crowd was eating it up, the music was varied and enjoyable, the access was fine aside from the mainstage pit issues. It was good to shoot a festival again.

Here’s a roundup of just a few of my favorite images. Also be sure to check out the full set at Flickr, with 130+ photos. And like me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter to keep up with my work!

Big Boi:

Atmosphere:

Blueprint:

Mac Miller:

Evidence:

Doomtree:

And, of course, no outdoor festival would be complete with a ton of fan photos:

Full set here.

Wow, I wrote this over a week ago and just forgot to post it. Here goes, and more concert photo posts to come soon.

Don’t have too much to say about shooting Jay-Z at the Verizon Center a couple weeks ago. It’s nice to shoot a performance where there’s really just one person you have to worry about shooting. I love shooting full bands, obviously, but the simplicity of just figuring out how to get good shots of a single subject is almost relaxing. Jay-Z proved a bit difficult, though, since like almost all rappers he tends to hold the mic really close to his face at almost all times. Shooting from the side with a long lens was the only way to get clean shots of his face while he was actually rapping.

During the third song, despite the high stage, I decided to bust out the ultrawide to hopefully get a slightly different look than the rest of the photographers were getting. I was reasonably successful, but ran into one problem: Jay-Z was using an enormous amount of really bright backlighting, and the wider the lens I used, the more of those backlights I got shining right into my frame and lowering contrast (yup, even with Nikon’s nanocoating). Still, well worth it for getting a bit of a varied look in my photoset.

Here’s the full gallery. I don’t think this show was my best work.

This post is mostly for you photogs who might be shooting the current ginormous Black Eyed Peas arena tour (there might be lots of you out there, this doesn’t seem like a particularly tough pass to get - lots of bloggers etc at the show I covered last night). If you just want to see the photos, go to my Flickr set here. This was a really fun show to shoot, which is good because that’s the only reason I went (I like a few older Black Eyed Peas songs but pretty much nothing since Fergie joined the band… also, her solo album is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard in my life). But the visuals were great, the lighting was amazing, and the production through the roof, so as a photographer I had a lot of fun.

First things first: the stage was set up with a huge catwalk extending into the audience from the middle. Photogs were in the pit for three songs for each band (except really only two and a half for Black Eyed Peas; more on that in a sec), and the pit extended all the way around the catwalk and on both sides of the stage. Nice. The two spots where the stage met the catwalk were generally the most popular spots to shoot from, and photogs at the DC show crowded around there. I found, though, that the stage was so high that shooting from there meant lots of up-the-nose shots, so on several occasions I backed off further down the catwalk and shot with a long lens. That way, the upward angle on my shots wasn’t quite as extreme, and I got cleaner shots without monitors and other stage gear in the frame.

BEP’s first three songs involve a half song’s worth of intro in which the band rise up from beneath the stage, highlighted by bright green spotlights. Getting a clean shot of them at this point is tough. During the first song, they pretty much all stay off the catwalk, except at the DC show Taboo wandered out a bit. Here’s the key: immediately at the end of the first song, I highly recommend moving all the way to the end of the catwalk. If you have two bodies, keep your long lens on one of them and put the widest lens you have on your other body. (My main regret from this show is not switching to my 14-24 at this point, instead leaving the 24-70 on my D700.) Fergie and will.i.am are going to walk down all the way to the end of the catwalk at the start of the second song, with apl.de.ap and Taboo following. If you get to the end of the catwalk before the rest of the photogs following the band get there, you’ll have your pick of a prime shooting spot, and you’ll be able to get nice long shots of them coming down towards you (as above) - shots that no photographers that don’t know what’s going on are going to get.

The group will hang out here for most of the second song. Here’s where your ultrawide comes in handy, because they are gonna be close. On my full-frame camera, 24mm really wasn’t wide enough for what I wanted to do - the above shot is a perfect illustration. It’s fine, but it’s lacking the impact that a wider view would have helped impart. Regardless, this is probably where your highlight photos are going to come from. The catwalk is way lower than the main stage, so the angle that you have to work with are much more appealing. Have fun with it, it’s only a couple of minutes.

The band will head back towards the stage at the end of the second song, and disappear for a while. In their place, some bizarrely costumed dancers will take the stage and catwalk. I shot a couple frames of the dancers (see below) and then used this time to take some crowd shots. This would also be a good time to take that ultrawide lens off of your camera and put your normal lens back on - in the time remaining the group isn’t likely to get close enough to you for you to get any more use out of an ultrawide.

As the third song begins, the visual highlight is clearly Fergie, who reappears before the rest of the group does. She’ll stand in the center of the stage, at the top of the steps down to the catwalk, and do a slow, fluid dance with her arms and upper body. White light on her plus some brilliantly colored fog in the background: here’s another chance to get some portfolio-worthy shots, such as the one I used to headline this post. Your best bet is to shoot this from somewhere along the catwalk, not too close to the stage so you’re not looking at too much of an up-angle, with a long lens. The headline shot is right at 200mm (35mm equivalent), and I was positioned alongside the catwalk maybe ten feet from the stage. Here’s a slightly wider image of what’s going on:

You’ve only got a minute or so at this point. The other members of the group will appear, but once will.i.am (I think it was him) shows up zooming around the air on wires, you’ll be escorted out. During the third song I’d recommend hanging out on the side of the catwalk further from the exit, so you have a few extra moments to grab some crowd shots or extra shots of the stage while walking back around to leave.

And that’s that: two and a half songs worth of brilliant lighting and sparkling costumes. The group doesn’t really pose for photographers the way some groups do, but they don’t need to; the visuals are already striking enough. As for the lighting, this is one show you can shoot without the benefit of fast primes or f/2.8 zooms - I was often at ISO 800, f4, 1/500th. It may have been the brightest show I have ever shot, and it helps that the costume design for the first three songs doesn’t involve all that much black clothing.

As for the opening bands: they’re also fun to shoot, and also very well-lit. They don’t use the catwalk at all, though, so you’ll be shooting upwards a lot. Be aware that Ludacris tends to hold his mic very close to his mouth, so you’ll need good timing and some side angles to get anything but mic-eating shots. Also, Ludacris has a bunch of dancers that jump around a lot, and if you can find the right angle, you can get some cool stuff like this:

Two final notes: one, I was pleased to find that there are no restrictive contracts to sign in order to shoot any of the groups. Unfortunately, this seems to be an increasingly rare thing at the big arena/stadium shows. Two, yes - I do a bunch of research before shooting shows that I know are going to be tightly scripted. The Internet (especially YouTube) makes it pretty easy, and it pays off. If you know what’s going to happen next, you have a way better chance of getting the shot you want, not to mention a shot few other photographers will get.

See my full photoset from this show at Flickr.