With Thanksgiving over, it was time to get back to work. In this case it was the Trey Songz show at the Valley View Casino Center on Saturday night. Now, I must admit than when this show was announced, I didn’t know who Trey Songz was. That’s when I do research. I check to see if there are live performance photos on the artists web site and do a Google image search. Knowledge is power and the more knowledge that you have going into the show, the better your chances are of getting great shots.
I was allowed to shoot two songs from the pit, no flash. The thing was that it was songs 2 and 3. So I spent the first song watching how Trey moved around the stage and watched the lighting. This allowed me to plan what I was going to do for the 2 songs that I could shoot and let’s be honest, only having one subject to pay attention to makes the whole thing a lot easier.
When you only get two songs (or three) many times all the photos can look the same. What was really nice about this shoot was that Trey actually started out in a jacket and sunglasses, then removed them. This gave me two looks in two songs. Thanks for that.
On a really random side note, the guy in charge, Steve, looked really familiar to me. He was really on it. Letting me know when I could go into the pit, watched to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid and when the two songs were over, I turned, shook his hand and left. On my way out the building, I suddenly realized that I had met Steve before. He worked on the Billy Idol tour, and he was a truly professional then and now. I love working with people like that. Makes it all so much easier.
As for gear, I went with my standard setup. A Nikon D4 with the 70-200mm f/2.8 and the Nikon D700 with the 24-70mm f/2.8. Both cameras were loaded with the Hoodman RAW 1000x CompactFlash cards and all images processed in Adobe Lightroom.
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