For most shows I photograph, I edit a few preview photos right away, and finish my gallery in the next few days. And after that, well, I’m usually done for the most part. Often, I’ll use a few presets that give me a good start to editing every image and then I adjust things like exposure and white balance from there.
This past fall, A R I Z O N A headed out on the Live For A Night Tour - their first headlining tour since 2019 - and I had the pleasure of photographing the Los Angeles and San Diego shows (10/26/23 at The Wiltern, and 10/27/23 at the House of Blues, respectively) for Substream. Then, in December, I caught their home-away-from-hometown show at The Van Buren in Phoenix (12/16/23), which I also shot for Substream. But… with all three AZ shows, I certainly wasn’t done going through photos when my galleries went live… and that brings us here, where I’ll be sharing some photos I haven’t shared yet, and talking about my editing process.
For the tour as well as the Phoenix show, AZ worked with lighting designer and programmer Carlos Katsurayama. And this light show was no joke: different colors of lights, smoke, a holographic back panel (LFAN Tour) and mirrored columns and tombstones (Phoenix - from the album cover and “Moving On” video), it was wild to look at. Every lighting look was vibrant and eye-catching - and things changed quickly. Back-to-back shots from within a song might look totally different. (Not to mention, the band are such dynamic performers - Zach and Nate, especially, move around a lot, meaning lots of photo opps!)
The LA show was definitely my favorite to shoot - the Wiltern is a beautiful theater and the high-up balcony made for some gorgeous crowd shots. The biggest difficulty there was that the stage was a bit high - but luckily the photo pit was pretty spacious. San Diego was a tougher shoot - the stage at the House of Blues was honestly at the perfect height to shoot, but the photo pit was smaller. This show was sold out which was amazing - but, there wasn’t really a great place for crowd shots. The stage at The Van Buren is really wide, and the photo pit is roomy - plus, the balcony gave some great angles to show how massive the sold-out crowd was.
The lighting design for the Phoenix show was similar to the fall tour. In both instances, the band opened with “Freaking Out”, which featured intense purple lights and haze. You’ll see in the first three images below that I tried out a few different editing styles on this photo of Zach; all three were used, at various points, as “templates” to begin to edit other photos with the purple lighting.
Another visual theme prominent in A R I Z O N A’s lighting was blue and green lights. The blues and greens were super saturated which presented quite the challenge: how do I maintain some level of true-to-life color (so my photos display how cool the lights looked in real life) while also maximizing detail and making images look sharp, and not muddy (as can often happen with super saturated, colorful lights)? As with the purples, there was no one answer - but overall, it involved a lot of decreasing saturation of various colors, adjusting hues, increasing sharpness, and my BFF, the dehaze function.
Ask a concert photographer what type of lighting is the hardest to work with, and 9 times out of 10, they’ll say red light. When it comes to color-correcting, red can be tricky to work with. My goal with shooting A R I Z O N A wasn’t to get “accurate” (read: same as in normal daylight) skin tones at the cost of showing the colors of the lights - but I won’t lie, red was tough. The first image here, of Zach and Nate at The Wiltern, looks moody and powerful as a silhouette with red light behind it. Scroll a few images past, and there’s a closer, head-on shot of Zach and Nate - I did some color-correcting on this one so their faces weren’t too red. You’ll also see several images here in what I call my “red haze” preset - this involved turning the images to black-and-white and adding a split tone, with a deep red for the shadows and a very light blue for the highlights. This was a different approach to show that the scenes were full of red.
The aforementioned focus on capturing the colors of the lights meant that I didn’t shoot a ton of pure black-and-white for these A R I Z O N A shows. I did find there were a few photos I really liked in black-and-white - below, I liked that the black-and-white versions of these close-up shots of Zach made some shadows less distracting; the three shots from Phoenix at the end were all pretty dark, so I liked that turning them monochrome gave me more room to increase exposure.
Ok, ok, white light is easy to work with. I won’t complain. But… what about all that haze and smoke? More dehaze button to make things clearer and sharper, then playing with exposure and curves and saturation so things look right. Ok, but what about that sick rainbow holographic panel upstage? That thing is bright - so for the photo of Nate and drummer / musical director Zach Mullings, there was some careful balancing to make sure the holographic panel wasn’t totally blown out. In Phoenix, there was a ton of super bright white light coming from the back - which, again, meant balancing exposure levels of the band members without making the back totally overpowering with white.
Okay, okay, so this next batch of photos wasn’t an editing or aesthetic style, but rather a special moment I wanted to share photos of. Before heading out on tour in October, A R I Z O N A announced the “Dark Skies Challenge” - fans could submit videos of themselves playing along to “Dark Skies” on their instrument of choice, and one lucky fan in each city would get to play with the band on stage. In LA, a fan named Tony came up to play “Dark Skies” on keys - and he was insanely good. Tony moved to LA from Beijing a few years ago to pursue music; he’s got so much talent, I have no doubt he’ll keep doing amazing things.
Over the summer, I bought a prism. I’d seen other photographers use one and was curious about it for myself. I’m definitely still getting the hang of just how to hold and angle the prism to get the best reflections, and what type of shots it works best in - but I had a lot of fun playing around with it at The Wiltern (I love the reflections of the crowd shown in the second photo below).
And with such great lighting, I knew I had to get some photos of the crowd. The Wiltern and The Van Buren proved to be killer opportunities for crowd shots; the House of Blues in San Diego just didn’t have a good vantage point. When shooting the crowd, I like to wait for moments where the light hits the crowd, so you can see the individual people as opposed to a mass of mostly black nothingness. I was happy I got the architecture of The Wiltern in the crowd photos from that show. The Van Buren was pretty different - most of the crowd was on the main level, not as many were up in the balcony, which wrapped around the room in a U shape. I found that using as wide of a focal length as possible really was key here.
All in all - I’m super happy I was able to photograph A R I Z O N A a few times in 2023, and certainly hope to photograph them again this year.
