I'm fond of this picture I took last night

[Roxy Poodle]

It's got some problems both technically and in terms of some uncontrollable crowd elements, but there's still something intangible that I like about it. Maybe just that I feel like it catches a nice moment? I took it toward the end of Jay Z's show at the Prudential Center in Newark. He was talking with people in the crowd and spotted a couple making the Roc sign together. (That's the hand signal in the foreground; it represents Jay Z's record label, Roc-a-Fella.) It was kind of cheesy, but Jay seemed genuinely to like it, and he pointed them out so the camera guys could put them on the big screen. I was aiming to get the couple in focus and Jay a little blurred in the background, and I thought it worked out pretty well. I don't know. Thoughts?

 


And just because I haven't posted anything lately, here are a few other shots I've liked from recent shows:

I took these at P!NK's show at Barclays Center (Brooklyn) in December:










These are from Kanye's Yeezus tour stop at Madison Square Garden. The show was closer to a theatrical performance than a concert. I didn't totally get it, I don't think, but it was definitely different!





Kanye used to be on Roc-a-Fella records, and he addressed his loyalty to the label in the remix of a song called "Diamonds from Sierra Leone". So he asked the crowd to throw their Rocs in the air when he played the song. The crowd obliged, and I thought it looked so powerful and cool.




I flew out to Vegas in September to check out Motley Crue's Intimate Evening in Hell residency, which was just fiery, super fun, and totally insane mayhem. The highlights in the first photo are totally blown out, but I loved Nikki's face and posture enough that I thought the picture still worked. The second picture is Vince singing "Home Sweet Home" which involved Tommy Lee's piano set on fire and an absolute blizzard of confetti. It was such a cool contrast to the rest of the red hot show.








And I spent September checking out as many Stone Temple Pilots shows as mass transportation (or sketchy casino buses from Penn Station) could get me to. Linkin Park's Chester Bennington is singing lead for them now, and it's always so incredible to watch a guy who's used to singing to 20,000 people playing in front of a couple hundred at a club. The first picture below is one of my favorites I've ever taken. I can't quite put my finger on why … maybe because it seems to catch a quiet moment in the midst of a loud and crazy show? Whatever it is, I really like it.
















Okay, I think that's more than enough for now!!!

[Tim]

These are all fantastic!! I love your work.

[Roxy Poodle]

Thanks, Tim! I got the camera that I shot all of these with in February of last year, and I really feel like I've learned and grown a lot in the year since. (I'd taken my first photography class a year prior to that, but I was too limited by my equipment for what I'd learned to make much of a difference.) It's nice to discover that old dogs really can learn new tricks!

[Tim]

Wow! That's so impressive. I would have thought that you've been at it for many years.

[Tim]

It shows. You are one of the best rock photographers I have seen.

[Roxy Poodle]

Wow! That's so impressive. I would have thought that you've been at it for many years.

Well, I've been looking at pictures of rock stars for about 30 years. (My teenaged bedroom was wallpapered with pinups from Metal Edge magazine, I'm sure much to my mother's chagrin, even though she played it cool and only ever insisted that I take down the poster with Nikki Sixx with rosary beads in his mouth. ) So yes, I had done a tremendous deal of prep work prior to picking up a camera!

[Roxy Poodle]

It shows. You are one of the best rock photographers I have seen.

Aw. Thanks! 

(And sorry for deleting and reposting my post! But now it just makes you look prescient!)

[Tim]

[badger]

Fabulous. I love seeing the photographs you take.

[moroccangirl]

I swear if these artists saw your photos of them they would take you along as their personal photographer. If I was rich and famous I would!

[Richard21142]

Awesome photos!

[Roxy Poodle]

Thanks so much, everyone! And MG, anytime you want to become rich and famous, I'll be happy to pack in my insane job and be your personal photographer!  

[Roxy Poodle]

I was scrolling through some old posts on Facebook tonight, and I'd totally forgotten about this: An artist once did see a photo I'd taken! Richard Marx, of all people! (Who, for the record, put on one of my favorite shows of 2013. I went just because I thought it would be fun to see one of my very first rock star crushes live, but he was fantastic -- very funny, great storyteller, and an excellent singer/songwriter.) At any rate, I posted a picture I'd taken at the show to Twitter the next morning, and this happened:

[GreenMan]

[Tim]

That's awesome!!

[Suesquatch]

Nice!

[badger]

Very cool!

[Roxy Poodle]

I'm just going to turn this into a perpetual concert photos thread! Please feel free to add your own if anybody else is shooting at shows!

I took these two at Justin Timberlake's concert at Madison Square Garden last night:






I had the best seats I've ever had for a show -- front row of the arena seats in the section immediately to the side of the stage. I was parallel with row 3 of the floor seats, but elevated to about the same height as the stage. And the show was just spectacular. I'd given up years ago on trying to rank shows as "best I've ever seen" because I go to so many different kinds of shows that I'd just decided they were impossible to compare. But 2014 has come out strong: Jay Z's first Magna Carta World Tour show at Barclays Center in January was the hands-down best show I've ever seen (I saw him twice more on that tour, and neither show came close to what was happening in the arena that night.), and Justin Timberlake's show last night at Madison Square Garden was the second best show I've ever seen. He's phenomenally talented and so universally appealing that it can't help but be fun. Seriously, I looked out over the crowd last night, and it was just men and women, old and young, black and white, gay and straight all just getting DOWN.

But still, there was something extra special going on last night. He sang Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" at one point, and three of his dancers came out from behind the stage to watch and take pictures and videos of the crowd singing along. These are people who have performed in all kinds of venues before all kinds of crowds all over the world, yet something was happening that made them want to come out and look. And I've never seen the staff of MSG so into a show. Word must have gotten out about a particular part of his show -- the entire front of his stage elevates and travels over the crowd from the front of the venue to the back at one point. It's the single most spectacular thing I've ever seen at a show. He's up maybe 30 feet in the air at the highest points, just dancing and singing. I've attached a video below that does it zero justice, but just to give an idea … At any rate, my seat was adjacent to a corridor that led backstage, and in the minutes before this song started, it seemed like every single usher and security guard and maintenance guy and MSG suit decided to find his way into the corridor and out onto the floor. It was really cool to see just everybody so completely *taken* with what was happening. And perhaps what I loved most: While all of this was happening, his band wandered down onto the floor, and they were just playing their instruments and dancing and chatting with anyone who happened to notice they were there. These are the sorts of things that makes one concert really stand out from all the rest, and the possibility that they may happen is the reason I go to shows. 

http://youtu.be/saMsfhcHSdE?t=2m15s

[GreenMan]

 

Someone posted this:

Justin Timberlake - Why you flipping me off?