The first thing that comes to my mind when writing about music photography is the adrenaline. Shooting gigs and concerts is a thrilling process of creating art through documenting art. Performance is a transience medium, the perfect moments of aesthetic resonance come and go, usually fleeting and never generous enough to repeat itself. Amidst the chaos of protecting your ears and avoiding being run over by other fellow photographers, you need to consider lighting, perspective, and composition in split seconds. This can get quite overwhelming. The exhilarating process of music photography is in fact its inherent challenge—freezing the fleeting moment.

I love the unpredictability of live photography, where I go in blind and take whatever work I manage to produce as my style clashes and melds with the artist’s. However, I’ve recently come across a new approach to shooting gigs. As I shoot more, I’ve grown to understand the little details better—the mechanics of the lighting, the performance’s next move, or what makes the crowd erupt. As I learn to anticipate these details, I learn how to plan ahead. A fun (or perhaps more burdening for some) approach to music photography is to see each show as an individually themed project. Perhaps similar to planning a commercial or portrait shoot, I set a theme or outline a vision to give me guidelines when I am committing to the shoot.

I start off by doing thorough research on the artist’s genre and style and often begin the night’s work by listening to their soundtracks on my way to the venue. Listening to the artist’s music helps me create a vision board of how I want to portray their work. Some might say that this is an excessive move, but I try to listen to the artist’s entire catalog before proceeding to the shoot. With preparations such as these, I find myself more decisive during the shoot. I work with a clear idea of the shots I need. This is a great way to avoid overshooting and relieves a lot of stress during post-production. At the same time, as a photographer, this helps me avoid repetition in my work. I stop trying to trap an artist in my own style. Although I may be shooting several artists of the same genre consecutively, the work I produce for each performance has its unique aesthetics. Most importantly, planning each gig as a little project like this makes it much more fun for me.

If you’re somewhat tempted to create little projects like this, bring your camera (that’s allowed by the venue) to whatever show you’re planning on going to and try to capture something. Happy shooting!