Last week was the SXSW film, multimedia, and music festival in Austin. It’s a pretty big deal and every Austin photographer I know shot at least one SXSW concert, party, or event, if not several.
Among the events that I covered was the BET Music Matters artist showcase. I worked for PictureGroup, a photo agency that specializes in entertainment photography.
Now if you’ve ever met me, you’d know that the BET showcase is not exactly somewhere you’d expect to see me. The line-up included several rappers and hip hop DJs, and I have to admit, I had no idea who any of them were.
I got to the venue – The Stage on Sixth – and was pleasantly surprised by the size. There was a smaller outdoor stage out back under a tent, a mid-sized stage in a large room inside, and an area blocked off as a VIP lounge. They gave me a “talent guest” badge and allowed me to walk around pretty much anywhere I wanted.
That being said, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to an evening of getting trampled by a mob of fans, or standing painfully close to large sub-woofers. I brought some ear plugs, a bottle of water, and found a safe hiding place behind the small stage before the show, just in case I needed to escape for a few minutes.
I had two camera bodies, one with a 24-70mm f2.8 lens and one with an 80-200mm f2.8 lens, my standard set up. I got close to the small stage before the show and expected to be mobbed shortly after the show started, but a miraculous thing happened. I guess the security guys were briefed that I was there because they made sure I had room to walk back and forth across the front of the stage and asked me every few minutes if I was okay.
The same thing happened at the larger stage. I went from dreading a shooting situation to being perfectly comfortable enough to concentrate on my job. I can’t say enough how great the security guys were. There wasn’t a situation, at least that I saw, that wasn’t handled well.
Anyway, I came away with a lot of pictures. Since it was a showcase, every artist got to perform a few songs on stage, then they moved on to the next act. Here are a few shots I got on the small stage:
After the small stage show finished, performances began on the larger stage inside. There were fewer artists, but each had more time. Here are a few images I got inside:
I returned home after the showcase at about 2:30 a.m. and then went to work editing. I sent in over 100 photos and got to bed just before 5 a.m. Click here to view the rest of the BET Showcase photos.