The Japanese rock band Dir En Grey played at Trees in Dallas Texas.

The publication I normally shoot for had applied for a press pass with the band but had not heard back yet so I went as a fan and left my camera in the trunk of the car.

The club was in what appeared to be a rougher but more artistic part of town.  Before the show we had several homeless people asking for hand outs which isn’t bad.  Everyone gets down on their luck sometimes.  Unfortunately though while waiting in line one of the homeless people who had obviously had a lot to drink decided to stand in line as well and yell almost incoherently at everyone.  He started out happy but then things turned bad.  He grabbed one of the guys in line by the shoulder.  The guy was a muscular young African American  male who told him strongly not to touch him.  The homeless man then got belligerent and started doing his best to get the guy to hit him.  The guy used a lot of restraint and didn’t do anything to the homeless man who was now yelling at him and wandering in and out of the traffic in the road next to the line.  Eventually someone got one of the security people working the front of the line and they came and were able to get the homeless man to move along.  I definitely recommend that anyone going to this venue do not wander off alone in the area at night.

I got to the front of the line and made it inside.  Coming in there were no metal detectors and security didn’t give any restrictions.  There were numerous people standing around inside with point and shoot cameras in hand so I decided to try my luck.  I ran back out and grabbed my SLR sticking my two favorite lenses in my pockets.   I came back in with camera in hand and no complaints from security.  The inside of the venue was large enough to hold several hundred people with multiple raised balcony areas that had good views of the stage.  There were also tables and chairs for those that didn’t want to stand.  Scattered throughout the venue area were large poles that had been fashioned to look like tree trunks.

There was a large curtain that was drawn that obscured the stage until the start of the show.  When the show finally started and the curtains parted it became clear that the tree theme extended onto the stage as there were several large poles shaped like trees on the stage.  As a photographer this was quite an inconvenience.  While you might think they would add interest to photos, in truth they weren’t distinguishable enough to show up as trees in the images, instead they just came off as poles that frequently blocked shots of the musicians.

The other major problem at this venue was the lighting.  They had three dim spotlights pointed at the stage and they didn’t move.  The main stage lighting was behind the band and was frequently red.  If you have done much concert photography you know that red lights tend to ruin detail in images.  I can’t remember all of the science behind it but it has something to do with how camera sensors capture light and how computers perceive it.

By the time the band hit the stage the venue was packed.  I had attended the previous night’s concert in Houston and they had drawn a much smaller crowd that didn’t nearly fill that venue.  This was a different story, wall to wall people.  As the band charged into their first song the crowd went crazy.  The crowd moved and flowed with the music.  I am tall.  Six foot four to be exact.  When I get to a venue I stake out a spot and stay in it.  I realize that being tall I can block people’s view so my belief is that if I stay in one place then anyone behind me came in after me and chose to stand there so I don’t feel guilty.  When the crowd started moving I was able to stay in place but I ended up with several very tall guys in front of me making photography harder.  The movement of the crowd also made it almost impossible to hold the camera steady to take a shot.   Combine that with the terrible lighting and the trees on the stage and this was the toughest show I have had to photograph.

I did my best to take some shots and try to check the images and histogram on the camera to figure out what the best settings would be but it was difficult to get anything that wasn’t either dark or blurry.  To try to cover my bases I tried a few different setting combinations and would shoot a good number of shots on each set of settings.

The band put on an amazing show.  Where the previous night was the opening of the tour and they had been plagued by technical difficulties, on this night everything went well.  The sound was great and the whole band really seemed to be riding high on the energy from the crowd.

Sadly when the band was about to do their break before the encore the battery in my camera died.  Since I hadn’t planned to shoot the show I hadn’t charged the battery and had left my spare in the trunk.  I dashed outside and got my spare.  When I got back there was no way that I would be able to be close to the stage.  I instead used the time to get some distance shots of the full stage.

I ended up shooting close to sixteen gigs worth of images.  Out of all of those images only a few weren’t blurry or too dark.  I used my best lighroom and photoshop mojo to try to improve them but most were just a lost cause.

While I will rent a quality lens for assignments, this time the fastest lens I had with me was a 50mm 1.8.  Comparing the images afterward I found that I should have stuck with 1/100th of a second on the shutter with iso at it’s highest and aperature all the way open at 1.8.  Those were the images that came out okay.  Any higher of a shutter speed and the images were too dark, any slower and they were blurry.

I will be seeing the band again later this month in Denver.  Hopefully I will be have an official photo pass and the lighting will be a bit better.  While the rowdy crowd can make photography difficult I wouldn’t trade it for a calm one.  A wild crowd always makes for a more photogenic concert.