Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart are back out on the road as Rush tours in support of their new studio Album Clockwork Angles. The tour stopped in San Diego last night and photographers were given the first two songs of the second set to try to capture the Rush experience. The two songs were plenty of time to shoot but there were some issues.

The first was that at no point during the first two songs did Alex and Geddy come to the middle of the stage at the same time so getting a really tight shot of all three members eluded me. The second issue was the heavy use of LED lighting in the second song. I started the first song with the Nikon D4 and the 70-200mm f/2.8 and the Nikon D700 with the 16mm f/2.8 fisheye. This seemed to be the only way to capture the whole stage.

And while the 16mm got the wide shots and practically the whole stage in the frame, the spacing was so wide that the shots lost impact. I switched to the 24-70mm f/2.8 on the D700 for the rest of the allotted time.

One of the biggest challenges in concert photography is to capture the drummer. Many times, this is close to impossible as there is just too much crap in the way. Neil Peart has an amazing amount of gear on stage and the drum kit actually rotates around allowing him to keep facing the crowd while playing different drums. For me, it was all about looking for an angle, then waiting for the drumsticks to be in the shot.

All the images were captured on Hoodman Raw 1000x Compact Flash cards and processed in Lightroom.