It’s crazy to think that Joe Strummer has been gone for almost a decade. The man was such a force of nature. He created primal, earthy music that never sounded gimmicky or lame. When people ask me who I look up to? Who I am inspired by? Who is my hero? Joe Strummer is one of the first names I usually reply with. I probably name my dad first, but he is slightly less cool (fine, a lot less cool) than the man who ignited the fire of punk rock and rebellion under a nation of desperate and helpless young teens. I was barely born in 1977 when The Clash released their eponymous first record, but their message of unity spread far into my generation and “London Calling” was the soundtrack of my youth.

I was lucky enough to photograph Joe Strummer three or four times in the late ’90s and early ’00s while he was on tour with The Mescaleros, promoting to amazing records, “Rock Art & X-Ray Style” and “Global-a-Go-Go.” Every concert was photographed with my trusty old Nikon point and shoot. A few frames came out well, but most produced throwaway shots that were lost during multiple moves. These two photos aren’t the greatest images of Joe, but I’m so glad I got to create them when I had the chance. I shared a few words with him at the Virgin Megastore in Herald Square, and thanked him for filling so much of my life with joy. He thanked me and talked to me for a little while about why he still prefers vinyl to CDs. Joe is definitely one of those legends that inspires me to do what I do, and do it well. Thank you, Joe.

I’m terribly behind on posts due to a couple of big projects, so I’m going to try to knock out a few in the next two or three days.

First off, I shot my first concert at Madison Square Garden a few weeks ago. Green Day were headlining New York’s biggest stage and the Atlantic City Board of Tourism and Warner Brothers were kind enough to set me up with review and photo passes.

Photographing MSG is insane—no doubt about. Huge venues like the IZOD Center in Jersey run like any other concert hall. You walk in, show your photo pass, and make your way to the front of the stage. Not so for MSG. I tried walking through the front door and was verbally mauled by security for trying to bring in my photo gear. I explained to them that I was a legitimate photographer, and was shown the door. One somewhat kind security guard told me to head around back to a VIP entrance and ask there.

Surprise, photographers get their own entrance at The Garden.The bad news was that we had to come right out after each set, whether or not we had an actual ticket to see the show. I guess that makes senese for photographers that are there just to shoot and run, but it sucks for duel reporter/photographers, such as myself (and a handful of other gents in the photo pit).

Luckily, there was only one opening act—The Kaiser Chiefs. After a short explanation of the rules by a senior PR person, me and about 10 other photographers were checked in, searched, and escorted to a massive cargo elevator that brought us directly to the side of the stage.

Green Day’s stage was massive, no doubt about it. Were it just the stage, I would have had to shoot the whole set with my 80–200mm zoom, but the band was smart enough to include a decent-sized runway that protruded right into the audience, with enough room for photographers to gather around.

The band took stage at the early hour of 9pm with a show complete with eyebrow singing fire, and a ton of nice white lighting. We only got two songs to shoot, but one was an epic-length 10-minute number.  The band was all over the place, but we all had enough time to run around trying to get the perfect shot. I used my 24–70mm for most of the set, only switching out to the longer lens for some tight shots.

The moment singer Billie Joe Armstrong strutted onto the catwalk, I dove for the back side and shot as many photos of him as I could with him silhouetted against the spotlights. That’s why a few of them look like I was actually on stage.

I spent a good part of the evening chatting with Bowery Presents photographer Michael Jurick and Huffington Post writer Jon Chattman. Both guys do amazing work. Jon was handed a camera to take some shots to go with the story, and I had a blast showing him how to shoot manual exposure to get some usable shots from a Canon Rebel with a kit lens, and Michael took some incredible wide angle photos of the band from in front of the cat walk. Makes you realize that you don’t need a giant zoom to shoot a giant stage.

This past weekend, I got the change to interview two members of the British punk/hardcore band the Gallows. The band’s singer, Frank Carter, is also an accomplished tattoo artist and has stated that is full-time job is tattooing, not music. That said, as the Gallows begin to blow up the metal charts, Carter might want to reconsider his career ambitions.

About two weeks ago, I got the opportunity to photograph one of my favorited bands, The Damned, at Irving Plaza in NYC. The band gave me the rare opportunity to shoot for as long as I wanted with flash (a rarity for concert photographers). After a few minutes, I found out why. The band plays emersed in darkness with occassional washes of red and purple. The minimalist lighting scheme, bolstered by the occassional strobe light assault, meant I spent most of the night juggling my exposure compensation dial on my camera and flash.

On top of that, I didn’t spend too much time with my eyes behind the lens, because the show was amazing. For nearly two hours, the band hammered out all their hits, including some rarities and handful of mid-80s goth tunes. With Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Joe long gone, it’s nice to see some punk legends are still hanging in there – alive and well.

I was originally using the working title “Rock Revolution” until I realized that there was a terrible Guitar Hero ripoff game of the same name. Not that it matters since most of the bands featured in the book are punk and hardcore acts. I’m now on the time consuming process of labeling and dating every caption. I wish I had meta data from all the negatives I took with disposable cameras back in the late ’90s. Thank god for Wikipedia. I’ll have some sample pages as I near completion. Now I just need to sit down for a few hours and write an introduction.

This entire set was shot with a Canon G9 point and shoot. For those on the fence about getting one, stop thinking, The G9 is the best sub-pro camera and handy in situations where you are forbidden to bring in a pro camera.

Case in point: For some reason or another I got shut out of shooting the Maiden show in Jersey. After being asked not to bring any cameras into the venue with removable lenses, I figured I might as well bring along the G9.

We were in row 20 from the stage with pretty good sight lines but no way to get a clear or steady shot. I set the camera on aperture priority and started firing at whatever I could get. If I timed the shot with the lights, I could get some decent highlights, but the grain at 800 and 1600 sucked. Luckily, a little post processing and some creative license later and I think we have some usable shots.

These are definitely not tack sharp shots taken with my 24-70mm L lens, but they are better than nothing. Or at least, better than the army of camera phone shooters I had to dodge.

I got a nice pick up by IronMaiden.com. Take a look here. I guess I’m not good enough to get a press pass, but good enough to land above Rolling Stone and The New York Times on Maiden’s own site. Go figure.

Last night, I got the rare opportunity to photograph one of my heroes at a club that holds 350 people. Chances like these don’t pop up to often, and when you get the call that Clash guitar slinger Mick Jones is in town with his new band, you come running. The show was at my favorite club in the whole world, the Asbury Lanes, and the band rocked for an hour and a half solid. He tore through most of the stuff off of his new record Carbon Silicon, which sounds a lot like The Clash and not alot like BAD. That’s a good thing.

Here’s the bad thing. Half way through the set, my 40D craps out on me. First it just kept reading “busy” when I tried to fire a photo off, then the autofocus gave up, finally the ISO and live view went. Panicked, I packed it all up and watched the rest of the show sans camera. The next day, the camera wouldn’t even show my photos (luckily I saved everything to the computer already). I showed the camera to my IT guy, who promptly removed the battery and the CF card and told me to wait five minutes. He then popped the battery and the card back in and the whole thing started working again. Go figure. He claims it just needed to reboot.

I called Canon anyway and got a lovely tech guy who a)spoke English b) new cameras c) wasn’t reading off a script. After a few minutes of detailed questioning, he came to the conclusion that it was either a strange glitch or something malfunctioned with the lens. I’m praying it’s the former, because I’m not about to give up my 24-70mm L to send to Canon for repairs. If anyone else has a problem like this, post it below. I’d love to hear what happened.

Anyone who shoots photos for more than just fun must check out Adobe’s photo management system Lightroom. The program is the ultimate workflow tool and has been a godsend since I downloaded the beta version over a year ago. Prior to using Lightroom, I pretty much just dumped everything into iphoto and exported the few photos that I thought were worth playing with in photoshop. Now, I have seamless integration between CS3, Bridge, and Lightroom.

But here’s the best part, pretty much all the tools I need to fix photos are available in Lightroom. With the exception of the dodge and burn tool, I can pretty much manipulate and salvage photos without having to open photoshop. I’ve been having tons of fun lately with the  channel saturation tool under in the HSL/Color/Grayscale component.

Take this shot from the Horrorpops show last Friday. The shot was fine on its own, but my wife suggested I drop all the color except for the red. In the saturation tool, I dropped every color element except for red down to -100. I left red at 0. The effect is really badass, giving the day of the dead bride/dance a bit zombie-rific look. Look closely and you can see that the red in her tattoo is even visible. Look closer and you can see the red noise by her armpit. On second thought, ignore that. I had to balance the brightness and the shadows to get the right mix of noise and contrast.

For those on the fence between Apple’s Aperture and Lightroom. Go download both demos and give them a spin. I liked Aperture, but Lightroom is just awesome.

Click the links below from more shots from the show:
Flickr Set or GLK PHOTO slideshow

As if the spread in last month’s Inked Magazine wasn’t cool enough, Savage Tattoo is running a bunch of my Dropkick Murphy’s photos to compliment a feature story by Scott McCool. Check out the April 2008 edition on sale now.

One of the worst clubs in the world to take photos at is the Asbury Lanes in lovely Asbury Park, NJ. Don’t get me wrong, this vintage bowling alley is a rockabilly wonderland teeming with fantastic live music, ’50s flair, and great food and beer. However, the lighting above the stage consists of three crappy yellow lights burning down on the band.

Trying to shoot at the venue has been a difficult task to say the least. Luckily, the shows are good, cheap, and plentiful, so I have no problem coming back again and again to try out new tricks and practice mucking around with my camera settings. Sometimes I have good experiences; sometimes I shoot 4GB of crap.

Last Saturday, we swung by The Lanes to check out a bunch of bands I’ve heard good things about, but have never seen live–The Arkhams, Knock Galley West, and the band in the shot above, Blue Suede Bombers. Rather than deal with tweaking all the colors and exposures later, I just gave up and cranked the ISO up to 3200 and shot in grayscale. All three bands turned out much better in black and white than in color, so I might have found the best way to photograph at The Lanes. We’ll see what happens at a sold out show.