Rack Out

This past weekend I was in Rochester, NY for Winterfest.  The weekend's headliner was Eddie James with other bands such as Canton Jones, New World Son, and 4 Trinity.  This weekend was a lot different than Ocean City but I was excited to be able to run the handheld camera on stage for all of the bands.  It is probably one of the most fun things I've ever done.  I stood on stage left with a $2,000 camera (hoping that's an accurate figure) and had to capture as much as I could of everything going on.  I was the action cam.  I learned a little bit of everything and it was especially fun because I'd never really done anything like it or picked up many cameras before in my life.

This was close to what the camera looked like.  Ours didn't have a mic on it and ours also had a screen that popped out of the side for low shots.

Basically I moved around the stage a lot trying to capture the more artistic shots of the piano or bass.  Whenever the crowd would start participating I would get shots of them; sometimes with the singer in the corner of my shot.  It was all a pretty amazing experience.  It allowed me to be creative and artistic in something outside of music and I thoroughly enjoyed doing that.

Something particularly interesting was a little thing they called racking out.  When they asked me to do this I would zoom in on something, most of the time the hands of the keyboard, bassist, guitar, or someone's hand worshiping in the crowd, and I would take it out of focus.  When they put my shot up on the screen I would slowly bring it back in to focus for a more artsy kind of shot.  It took me a few tries to really get it but I finally did and we used it a little more often.

All in all I found that this job required me to be constantly aware and looking for action shots at every turn.  It's definitely my favorite job of winterfest.  Nothing compares. haha