Needtobreathe and Ben Rector Live

For several years, I have had the honor of being the house photographer for Clemson University's Littlejohn Coliseum when they have entertainment acts. This past Friday was a special opportunity to shoot one of the most dynamic and unique acts around right now Needtobreathe. As a bonus, the crowd was charged as they are a local band made good.

Ben Rector opened the show with his energized style of southern bluesy rock. He was bred for live performances and never stopped in succeeding in getting the crowed completely bought-in to the performance.

From a photographic technique standpoint, shooting Ben Rector and his band was fairly straight-forward. All the rules of capturing each member in a great moment was the standard challenge.

Things changed considerably when Needtobreathe took the stage. I have shoot their performance before and remembered the challenges and this one was no different. Their stage setup is very dramatic and unique. The first song starts in near total darkness - a great device for creating drama for the crowd but a bit of a nightmare for someone who has only 3 songs to capture it. 30 seconds or so, total darkness is replaced by split-second blasts of blinding light. Again, awesome for ticket holders, not so much for the photographers. These are the times that experience kicks in and even new lessons are learned.

I love shots with strong back-light. There were several opportunities to capture images like this.

Using no spotlights and moody under-lighting made shots like this tough to capture but totally worth it when it works.

Strong use of just one color lights (in this case, green and and blue) meant that those channels would be totally saturated and meant that keeping that image would go to the use of Black and White. Others were kept to capture the actual look and feel, but you can't really release just as series of green images, only use a few for setting the ambiance.

Concert photography is far-and-away the toughest type of photography I do because of the unpredictable lighting changes and the low-light nature of the events. In 8 minutes, I can shoot off 200+ shots and it's like no time has passed. I requires total concentration and I love it.