There are a ton of music festivals in Dallas and while most of them have seemed to find their place in the city and are becoming traditional annual events like Homegrown and Untapped, JMBLYA is growing at such a rapid pace that its still continuing to evolve and test out its potential each year. The 2016 edition was its biggest yet and brought in over 20,000 people to Dallas' Fair Park and boasted a lineup of some of the biggest acts in hip-hop like Future, Rae Sremmurd, Post Malone, Kehlani and Kevin Gates. I genuinely think this festival put together by Scoremore has the potential to grow into something like Van's Warped Tour since it's already booked for Austin and Dallas, so it wouldn't be too crazy to eventually see the festival add more cities each year. Pretty exciting stuff.
Shooting More and Missing Less
As I mentioned in my last post, spring games are generally meaningless but for a young sports photographer like me I'll take every opportunity I can get to improve my shooting skills. And because I took the opportunity to shoot North Texas' spring game in Denton I had a huge revelation: I need to shoot more to miss less.
It seems like a simple and obvious statement but "spraying and praying" isn't how I typically shoot. I'm usually much more calculated and waiting for "the moment." In football, and any other sport, the game just moves too fast and waiting for a moment means you'll usually miss it. That's how it was for me. So many of my sports photos are taken just after the moment I really wanted to shoot. I want the photo of the receiver fully extended in the air catching the football or I want the linebacker right when he's making initial contact with the ball carrier but I always release the shutter just a little too late because I was "waiting" for it.
This issue has a little to do with the equipment I'm using. Typically I'm shooting with a Canon 5D mark III with a 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L so I'm only getting about 6 frames per second compared to the 12 or 13 of the 1DX and my lens doesn't focus as fast as the 400mm f/2.8L. But this time as I saw the ball in the air or I saw the ball carrier getting close to colliding with a defender I shot much earlier than I normally do and let AI Servo do its work and it paid off pretty well. I ended with a few more peak action shots of receivers and defenders than usual but I still need to work on tracking the ball better as it makes its way through the air to a receiver.
The goal is always to be better than I was last time and shooting this game really helped me.
Fine Tuning New Techniques During Spring Football
The spring games that college football teams host for fans and media every year to get their first glimpse of their new team is generally meaningless. Yes, it's a nice chance to get a look at redshirt freshmen or the new recruits who enrolled early but for the most part, even though the spring game looks like football it's nowhere near close to the real thing. There are no big hits, quarterbacks are protected and it happens at about half speed. For someone like me, though, it's a great opportunity to practice some shooting techniques I've been working on. And, after a few months without football it's nice to see anything resembling the real thing.
The first technique I worked on was my exposure. I've always underexposed my photos for fear of clipping highlights and not being able to recover that data in post processing, and because of that I sometimes end up with photos that have harsh shadows blacking out the players' faces, which is no good when you're trying to sell these photos. This game I made sure to slightly overexpose the image to get a nice clear look at their faces and I had some good practice doing so because it was a cloudy afternoon and the light was constantly changing. It felt a little odd at first as I was chimping at my photos but once I accepted that I wasn't coming close to clipping any highlights I got used to it. And I have to say ... these photos came out so much cleaner than I would've expected. It sounds silly and obvious to say, but the proper exposure makes all the difference.
The second thing I worked on was getting over my fear of cropping. Last season I ran into bad luck with schedules and had to shoot nothing but night games. Because of that, I had to shoot with high ISOs like 5000 and 6400 because of the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L I'm using and I lost the opportunity to crop because my photos were already grainy to start. On this day I was able to shoot with ISO 100-400 and since the image was so sharp I was able to crop in a lot on the photos and ended up with a ton more isolated action photos than I normally do.
It's a bummer that these aren't legit game photos because I'm really happy with the results but this practice will pay off once the regular season starts in September.
G-Eazy's When It's Dark Out Tour Hits Dallas, TX
G-Eazy's When It's Dark Out tour brought out thousands of the Bay Area's most dedicated fans to The Bomb Factory in Deep Ellum for a sold-out concert that put the rapper's superstar potential on full display.
Before Young Gerald took the stage Harlem rapper A$AP Ferg worked the 4,000-plus person crowd into a frenzy with hits like "Shabba," "Dump Dump" and his latest single "New Level." Despite the raging and the party antics, Ferg made sure to take time to celebrate the life of his friend A$AP Yams with a touching tribute.
As expected, G-Eazy took the stage and the venue went nuts. It's a little hard to comprehend the massive fan base he has considering he's technically an underground rapper who gets no radio play and little media coverage from major music publications. Nonetheless, he's been able to develop a dedicated fan base on the strength of his live show and his heartthrob aesthetic, which is something I wrote about for the Dallas Observer and you can read here.
This wasn't my first time seeing G-Eazy. In fact, this was probably my fourth or fifth time seeing him perform and I'm just taking a guess here but I wouldn't be surprised to see him performing in an arena next time. His superstar trajectory shows no signs of slowing.
Marfa, TX
Cliché photos are typically a photographer's nightmare, right? Nobody wants to be seen as a copycat or unoriginal but every so often there's a landmark or site that is so iconic it needs to be captured and there's only so many ways it can happen. This permanent installation by Elmgreen and Dragset called Prada Marfa is one of those for me. It's just one of those photos I've always wanted to capture and after an 8-hour drive from Dallas I sure as hell wasn't going to be shy about getting it. Now, as cliché as this may sound, I'm really glad I did shoot this because not only was the Marfa road trip a great time but a great story came out of this moment.
My friend and I had talked about going to Marfa for a while to check out the installations and just take in the laid-back nature of the small town but the real catalyst for us finally heading out there was a band we both like from Brooklyn called Slothrust was playing a show at an outdoor venue called El Cosmico and it just seemed like the perfect opportunity to make the trip. What's funny is the day after we saw the band play at the venue we headed out to this Prada installation and while we were snapping photos and just taking it in the band Slothrust pulled up right behind us and started doing this the same. It was just a genuinely serendipitous moment and they actually asked me to take a photo of them in front of the installation, which they ended up using as a concert flyer. Pretty funny stuff. Anyway, this is probably one of the most cliché photos I'll ever take but I absolutely love it.