Limitations.....

This weekend's project was to shoot images of a live concert recording for use on the front and back of the CD sleeve. The disk is to be called "It's Good To Be Live Vol. 2" and the artist, as you might have guessed, is Javier Mendoza.

The reason I titled this post "Limitations" is because of what I experienced on show night. To understand where I am coming from you should know that I am a paraplegic who has been using wheelchair for many years. Up to this point when shooting live concerts I simply took the shots I could get and didn't really concern myself with the ones I couldn't. I am not saying that I haven't done some interesting things to get a shot, like transferring out of my chair and climbing some stairs to edge of the stage, but I do recognize that there are some shots I simply will not be able to get. To make a long story short, this project turned out to be both one of the most liberating and frustrating things I have done in a very long time. The liberating part is that I actually did get some usable images, the frustrating part was knowing how much better the images could have been. There were three main problems that I couldn't find ways to overcome before the show started:

1) The show was held in a grassy area with a ground level concrete pad for a stage. This severely limited my ability to quickly move from one side to the other. Any time I would slowly cross I would be directly between the audience and the performer making my anxiety level very high any time I decided to stop and squeeze off a few shots.

2) With the stage being on ground level I lost the ability to shoot from down low to avoid or minimize obstructions like mic stands. What magnified this problem is that the performers were all sitting which put the obstructions right at my shooting height. Had I been able to either stand up, or get down on the ground without causing too much of a commotion this problem would have not been an issue.

3) Although I theoretically had full access sanctioned by the band, I lacked the maneuverability in my chair to get into the tight places around the lighting stands and PA that would have given me the best angles at my shooting height.

Being the kind of person that I am, there is no way that I am going to let these things stop me in the future. The first thing I did the morning after the show was to get on the Internet and try to find some solutions. After a few hours with Google, I found something that seems almost too good to be true. It is called a Zigview. This device connects to the eyepiece and remote shutter release socket on your camera. This in turn is connected to a small view screen via a 6 foot cable allowing you to control most of the functionality of the camera while viewing a live video image of the view finder at a distance of six feet! If I were to connect my camera to my monopod this device would provide exactly what I have been looking for. Without getting out of my chair I could shoot anywhere from ground level to 10 feet in the air! I will be reading more on this device. If the reviews are favorable, I might have to put it close to the top of my future purchase list.