I love watching live concerts and I really love photography. So what could be better than photographing a live concert? Translating the sounds and emotions on stage into a photograph is pretty amazing, but a photo is only one moment in time. It says nothing about what happened before or after that moment. How much of an artist can you capture in a few frames when their performance encompasses a whole hour?

Some moments are able to define a musician's stage presence. Just think about the photo of Jimi Hendrix bent on his knees over a flaming guitar. So it becomes a challenge for me to get that kind of photo. But then I run into a problem. If I want to focus on my photography, the technicals start running through my mind. I contemplate the erratic lighting, the diffusion from the fog machine, and the overall composition of the frame. I pull myself out of the concert experience and no longer let the music move me. At a recent Gay Blades show, I barely took any pictures because I was just too excited by the music to concentrate on my camera. I didn't want to watch the show through a viewfinder.

I guess the answer would be to see a band two nights in a row. One night I'll take my pictures, and the next night I'll just watch the show.