What a night!

For those of you reading this that don’t live in Los Angeles, you might now know who Mark and Brian are. They are a pair of radio personalities that have a morning show on KLOS in LA. I listened to them all through the 1990’s and one of the highlights was always the year end Christmas show featuring an ” All Star Band” stand up comedy, a reading of the Night before Christmas and a musical headliner.

This year, the Christmas show was back and the headlining band was Billy Idol. Thanks to Steve, I was able to not only attend the show, but photograph it as well. Now my goal was to shoot Billy Idol and his band but I was able to shoot the whole show.The Mark & Brian All Star Band consisted of Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, Peter Frampton, Paul Rodgers (Bad Company, Queen, Free), Michael Anthony (Chickenfoot, Van Halen), Steve Lukather and Jason Bonham (Led Zeppelin), John Waite, Mark Bonilla and more.

A couple of notes before the images:

• The Nokia Theater doesn’t have a photo pit. It has a seating area right up to the stage and most photographer is done from the aisles. This is fine when the crowd is seated but becomes difficult when the crowd is up on their feet rocking out.
• There were no real rules posted and no one told me what I could and couldn’t do. I tried really hard not to get in any of the concert goers way. That meant staying low and shooting through people instead of pushing my way in front of them. This meant that some of the images are unusable  because of people from the crowd in the shots.
• All images taken with a Nikon D700 and a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens on Hoodman CompactFlash cards. Since the venue was pretty bright, especially during the All Star band, I was able to use pretty high shutter speeds and never had to push the ISO over 1600

Thanks for everything Steve