AWESOME, One in a lifetime, AMAZING! all these words describe Saturday Night.

After a busy week, Saturday was definitely a special treat for me. I was asked to shoot PerryPalooza at Bare pool, located at The Mirage. PerryPalooza is a birthday celebration for Jane’s Addiction front man, Perry Farrel. The rockstars that attended and performed just kept coming and coming. Surpirse guests left and right. So many i dont even have the full list.

Here is who i can remember:

Deborah Harry of Blondie!, Billy Idol, Juliette Lewis, Dave Navarro, Mark McGrath, Mickey Avalon, Donovan Leitch, Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins of Jane’s Addiction, Martyn Lenoble and Peter Distefano of Porn for Pyros, guitarist Wayne Kramer, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Guns n’ Roses’ Matt Sorum, Billy Morrison from The Cult, Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog and Bobo, and artist Shepard Fairey, who secretly played bass on Morello’s “Ghost of Tom Joad.”

It truly was a 80s/90s rock fans, wet dream.  It was a culmination of so many generations of Music, all on one stage. And at times all performing together. It turly was a one in a lifetime experience for many, and i am so happy i was able to be there.

On to the pictures, lightign was good and bad all at the same time. They really didnt prepare for photographer to shoot from the base of teh stage, so there wasnt any boxed off photo pit. Photographer did end up at the base of the stage, but it just wasnt setup the way i like, with fans literally at my back. So i decided to take the high road. I had my 70-200 2.8L IS on my 1dmkiiN and my 16-35L on my 5d. There was a section for VIP, center stage, so i decided to shoot from there. Not my preference but i would get a different perspective then all the other photographer so i decided to give it a go.Denie Truscello and Robert Knight were both on Stage shooting from the right hand side of the stage. I respect Denise for all she does in this town and is an awesome photog, and Knight is just an amazing concert photog, if i could have 10 % of the talent these two did i could die happy. But i digress. On to the photos.

to see more of the set. click on any of the images, it will lead you to the flickr set.

Billy Freakin Idol!!!

Somthing you wont see everyday. Navarro and Idol jaming together.

Tom Morello, Rage against the Machine...

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Deborah Harry, really? And i thought it couldnt get better

Perry. I mean this guy knows how to throw a party.

I havent shot a concert in awhile so i know the images arent up to standard. I am only really happy with 1 or two images from the 1200 images i fired off. Getting used to the back lighting and smoke was really a trial, i have the utmost respect for all the concert photogs out there. I definitely had some concert rust to kick off. But hopefully ill get to shoot more concerts in the future, as i love shooting them. They raw emotion and energy you get to capture is euphoric.

Stage setup, and where i stood.

If you have any comments or critiques i would love to hear them. Its the only way to become better. So fire away. 🙂

to see the full uneditted set. go to http://www.SpyOnVegas.com

and direct link to the concert.

http://spyonvegas.com/index.php?query=galleries/recent/view/3043

Promotional Photoshoot for Tao Nightclub for their SuperBowl event

So i get a text last week, asking me to do a promo shoot for Tao Nightclub for an upcoming SuperBowl event. As long standing clients of mine i rearrange my schedule to suite the day they need. I get the gist of the shoot stating its for the promo ad and electronic bill board yadda yadda yadda. But i ask what they have in mind they explain we want club environment but have the girls looking sassy in football costumes. I say ok cool i have a couple ideas.

Sooooooo i bring what i feel is necessary, I wanted to do something cool upstairs in the beach area, and maybe utilize a huge Buddha they have. But when i get there, the coordinator(a good friend) says we will need to shoot the girls and our designers are gonna cut them out. i think darn it!!! Tao nightclub doesn’t have a blank wall anywhere, or any real big curtain or anything, i told him he should have told me i had a backdrop with seamless paper so it would have been so much easier. He says he forgot and told me not to worry about it, just do the best i can, and try to find a plain area. No biggy.

So i wanted to try a beauty setup with the new ringflash, where i use my 5 ft octabank high above camera angled down to get that kinda beauty look and they use the abr800 to bring out the shadows a bit and rim/kicker on both sides….

well that idea did not work well at all in test shot, so i scratched that. Went with my very trusty setup ring fill with octabank high cam right.

they needed individuals and group shots

Link to the full set is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38283834@N00/sets/72157612613596536/
here is what i got.
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