A few nice Arts & Entertainment images I found: Image by Thomas Hawk 2007-04-12 09:09:05 One of my favorite types of photography is concert photography. I'm not sure why, but music is one of the only things that comes close to photography for me personally in terms of art that I enjoy consuming the most. So when the two collide it creates a super powerful way for me to enjoy my favorite bands. Concerts especially hold special memories for me. Watching Jerry Garcia and the Dead play Sugar Magnolia, that super hot tight Caterpilar t-shirt that made me fall in love with Kim Deal from the Pixies at the Ventura Theater in 1988, Holding Exene Cervenka's hand at the edge of a stage at the Palace in Hollywood. Social D at Fender's Stardust Ballroom in Long Beach. But before I digress into a long endless rambling stream of all the great bands I've ever had the good fortune to see, let's get back to the topic of hand. Concert photography. In general, with most reasonably well known bands and artists you are not allowed to just shoot them with DSLRs at concerts. Most artists and their managers try to maintain a certain amount of control over their high quality images and especially the commercialization of these images. And so most venues that you see major acts at will have no photography policies. Most of the time it's pretty easy to smuggle in a little point and shoot or camera phone. And most of the time bands don't really care about these point and shoot type images. These pictures almost always end up on fan sites, MySpace, photo sharing sites and the like and are generally not commercially viable images of a band. High grade professional DSLR systems and lenses though are another story. And these are the cameras that typically are not allowed into most concerts. With a little work ahead of time though I've found that most concerts are actually reasonably easy to shoot. The key is to obtain permission ahead of time and get a photo pass. Once you get a photo pass you pretty much have carte blanche to shoot most shows, although I'll mention some limitations later in this article. Before obtaining a photo pass for a show the first thing is to understand why they are given out. The reason why Rolling Stone gets a photo pass and the general photography hobbyist doesn't is that most artists (and even more so their managers) would *love* to see a nice big double page photo spread of their act in Rolling Stone. What they don't want to see is someone selling "official" posters of their band on eBay without their permission. But it's not just Rolling Stone that gets the photo pass. These days bands are looking for exposure and publicity anywhere they can get it. This means magazines, newspapers, websites,
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