Behind the Story: Taste of Chaos Tour
The article for the Taste of Chaos Tour has been officially released.
http://www.nt2099.com/J-ENT/INTERVIEWS/TASTEOFCHAOS/tasteofchaos-jrock.pdf
It's always a good sign when an article gets approved so quickly. For my new readers, when an article that I worked on gets released, I like to blog about the experience. For those that don't know the story, when I first started surfing the internet back in the 90's, J!-ENT was one of my favorite websites. I was a big fan of Asian pop music and dramas and still am. I was thrilled when I was invited to join the team in 2004. I jumped on it and never looked back. If you do press work, it's always a good thing to cover things that you find interesting. The first show I shot for them was at a small club in Hollywood called KingKing and it was a show with all indie bands. I've gradually worked up to larger clubs and major-label acts. This was my first arena show.
Okay, here we go. We'll skip the first three pages for now. Those photos appear again later in the article, so lets jump ahead to the interview which starts on page 4. The press check-in time for interviews with the Japanese bands was 1:30PM. Our reporter for the article was Wynne Ip. I hadn't worked with Wynne since PMX 2006, but we hung out with each other at JRock Revolution last year. It's always good to work with Wynne because she's such a pro. There were 5 outlets including us covering this--websites, a college paper, a local magazine. We were all let up to the top level of the arena to the waiting area and interview room. If you look at the photos, this room was tiny and was probably a storage room. They just set up a table and a background and that was good enough I guess. The other groups had to pair up, and it looked liked we were the only group that had a one-on-one interview. Why? I really don't know, but it was a good deal.
We go into the interview room and the seven band members and our interpreter are in there and we get to work. I had never heard The Underground's music before, but I saw MUCC and D'espairsRay and JRock Revolution. I'm a D'espairsRay fan and HIZUMI is one of my favorite JRock vocalists. So, when I walked into the room, I thought "This is kinda cool." I moved all the chairs from the previous interview group out of the way because I didn't want empty seats in my photos and they were just in the way. This was my first press assignment with a new camera, which I had owned for less than 2 weeks. It was almost a learn-as-you-go situation. I don't like to use a lot of direct flash even with my flash mounted on a flash bracket. I had some success bouncing light off the ceiling but as the interview went on, I found that bouncing the flash off the right upper corner of the room worked really well. The default preview screen on the LCD of the D300 shows a lot of useful information including a side-by-side thumbnail and histogram so it's easy to analyze and add some flash compesation when it was necessary. When shooting the guys from The Underneath, who were on the far left, the light has a long way to travel so I had to boost the flash comp. by 1eV at times. The interview lasted about 30 minutes and it was lot of fun. The guys had some interesting stories and seemed to be enjoying it. All of the interviews were done by 3:00 and we were cut loose until the concert.
After that, we went to check out the crowd (page 11). I tried to find some people I know because there's always somebody I know at these things. After taking a few shots of the line, Wynne decided to go get something to eat. I ate before I arrived so I just hung out for awhile. I went up to the Terrace Theater area and took a photo of the marquee, which is the top photo on page 11. That was just a fun moment for me. Many years ago, I stood on the very same spot and took this:
After I took the shot in the article, I just kinda stood there and thought about all the things that I've been through and all of the work it took to get to this point. It was always my dream to shoot a really big concert in an arena or amphitheater and now, I was just a few hours from being able to do that. Honestly, when I started photography, I never tought I'd be doing things like this. Those were just crazy dreams.
Now, on to the show. At about 4:30 all of the press that were there for the Japanese bands were handed off to Livenation. Up to that point, J Shock/JRock Revolution was handling us. From now on, we needed to be escorted everywhere. I had switched from my camera bag to my belt pack. The holding area was in the floor section of the arena but far off to the right were the crowd didn't want to go because it's a bad view of the stage from there. The rules were basic. The escort brings all photographers into the pit before the set. You get the first three songs from each band to shoot. The escort brings you out.
Shooting this show was actually one of the easiest shows that I've ever done. The photography area was right were it should be--front and center and protected from the crowd. There was a lot of room in there to move around and they cut you loose. You can do whatever you needed to do as long as you stayed in the pit. Everybody in there was serious about getting their jobs done. There were all photographers or videographers. There were no freeloaders, which is one of aspects at conventions that annoy me. Lighting was good. Big show = big lights. It's also nice to have lighting techs who aren't in love with those annoying red lights. In addition to red, we got blue, green, yellow, and purple and it really looked awesome. In the photo pit, it's very loud and very hot. You can hear the crowd just going nuts. The arena floot was a general admission area with no seats to there was a lot of body heat because the crowd was just crushing each other. The security guys had to drag some people out of the crowd and into the photo pit because they were in distress. The order of the bands was actually D'espairsRay, MUCC, and The Underneath played last out of these bands. The stage setup was a little different. There was the main stage and a smaller stage immediately adjacent to the left of the main stage, where smaller bands would play while the main stage was being set up for the next band.
Basically, I had a really good time being down in the photography pit and living my dream. The stage was about 5 ft. high so I've never had to deal with a stage that high before. Long lenses are your friends because you can shoot from the side areas and not shoot at such a steep angle. Being in the center and shooting almost straight up is not good. I love using my belt packs at concerts because it lets me be more mobile and I can change lenses faster. Using a shoulder bag screws up your balance and having to reach into your bag to change lenses will cost you time. The Underneath played on that little side stage so shooting then was a little tougher, but with a long lens, I didn't have as hard a time as some other people did. In the end a lot of people complained about how hard it was to shoot their set, but it wasn't that bad.
After I done shooting the live performances, I went out into the lobby for some autograph sessions. I caught most of the MUCC session. If D'espairsRay had one, I was probably still inside the arena shooting something. TokyoPop also had a booth and a bit later, all 3 bands did a signing there together, but we didn't use any of those photos for this article. I actually found a few friends at this autograph session and took photos of them going through the line and those photos are safely in their hands. I left at about 9:30 because my work was done and I was starving.
I'm really pleased with the way the article turned out. I think just as our OLIVIA interview in 2006, this will open up a lot more opportunities down the road. JRock Revolution 2 hasn't been announced yet and I'm hoping it will be somewhere reachable. Right now, my goal is to be the best Jpop/Jrock concert shooter in the US. There aren't very many of us who get to do this outside of anime conventions. I think it's a very attainable goal.