At the risk of dating myself a bit, I’ve been a Pearl Jam fan since high school. So it was obviously a big deal for me to get the opportunity to shoot their show last Thursday at Jiffy Lube Live (formerly Nissan pavilion) for the Washington Post. It was just icing on the cake that my photos were used on the front page of Saturday’s edition.
There are only a few rules that photographers have to abide by when shooitng Pearl Jam. The most important is that the band does not allow photographers to move from side to side in the pit. You have to pick a side and stay there for the first three. This means choosing Mike and Jeff’s side or Stone’s side. I had chosen Stone’s side when I shot the band at the Verizon Center in 2008 so I wanted to grab a spot of Mike’s side this time.
This ended up not working out as most of the other photogs had the same idea. There was a video camera to the left of the spot in front of Mike’s mic, so I decided to move over to Stone’s side. Ultimately this was the right decision, but this meant not many shots of Mike and Jeff.
Lighting was great other than the first minute of the opener “Elderly lady Behind The Counter In A Small Town.” My only complaint is Eddie was on guitar for two of the first three songs so we only got one song of him in frontman mode, but that’s just me nit-picking. Overall, we got everything we could have wanted in the first three.
I shot this show with my 70-200/2.8 VR 1 on my Nikon D3 and my 24-70/2.8 on my Nikon D700. See the full photo set below:
Pearl Jam @ Jiffy Lube Live – Images by Kyle Gustafson
Please not re-use any of these photos without permission.
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