A selection of my favorite images from the October 4, 2012 show at Huntington Center in Toledo, OH. As with the Eden’s Edge photos from the previous post, this Little Big Town set was part of the Rascal Flatts “Changed” Tour of 2012.
The full gallery of images can be viewed here.
All images ©2012 Jon Diener. No unauthorized copying, reposting or distribution permitted.
Back in about 2007, when my son was in the Music Business program at Belmont University in Nashville, he met a trio of musicians that were relatively new to Music City and needed some demo recordings. He did a few sessions with them over a period of a couple years and shared some of those recordings with me at the time. I thought the singers/musicians were very talented and showed a great deal of promise with their songwriting.
Now, fast-forward to 2012…
After a few months of distractions in other areas of life, I realized I haven’t posted anything about the last couple shows I’ve shot. So, here’s the first installment of Operation Catch-Up 2012.
You may have read an earlier post of mine, 10 Years and 180 Degrees Later, about returning to DTE Energy Music Theater to witness my son work his magic as Front-of-House sound engineer for Joe Nichols. That was on June 20, 2010. Fast-forward 2 years and a month… and it’s deja vu all over again. This time with Chris working for Little Big Town, and touring the country as part of the Rascal Flatts “Changed” tour.
The Mayan calendar seems to come to an abrupt end in late 2012, so why not celebrate the end of times with a summer music tour? Specifically, the Last Summer on Earth Tour.
Little Big Town – November 18, 2011 – Honeywell Center, Wabash, IN
As you probably know by now, my son works in the music business in Nashville. He has toured as sound engineer for several country music acts including Chris Cagle and Joe Nichols. Currently, he is approaching his one-year anniversary with Little Big Town, as their monitor engineer and production manager.
Last November, I was able to spend the afternoon and evening watching him do his thing at the last show of their tour in Wabash, Indiana. After meeting LBT members Karen Fairchild, Jimi Westbrook, Kimberly Schlapman and Phillip Sweet (as well as band members and remainder of the crew), I watched the soundcheck, took a group photo of everyone to commemorate the final show, and then got to watch and photograph the entire show. Here are a few of my images from that experience.
My son's view at each show.
Strike and load-out.
Little Big Town members, band and crew.
Despite the nearly 7 hour round trip drive, I enjoyed every minute of my day with Chris and the LBT gang. Being treated like one of the family, I was extremely grateful for the southern hospitality extended to this middle-aged yankee.
Be sure to check out my complete portfolio of live music images here.
Thanks for visiting!
May 13, 2011 – Detroit, MI
WYCD-FM Downtown Hoedown
Joe Nichols and a few of his close friends. - © Jon Diener
Bassist Michael Jeffers - © Jon Diener
Justin Weaver and Dan Agee tearing it up. - © Jon Diener
Drummer Wes Little - © Jon Diener
Joe Nichols - © Jon Diener
Joe Nichols says "good night" to Detroit. - © Jon Diener
View the full image gallery here.
It is an interesting period in photography right now. Technological advances in camera bodies, lenses and software, along with a burgeoning social media revolution and widespread availability of training and tutorials, have all converged to make advanced photography available to the masses. That’s a good thing, right? Well, not so much.
I figured I would sneak in one more blog post before 2010 is over and done. It’s been an interesting year, with many highs and a few big lows. I’ve written about some of those in previous posts, so I won’t dwell on them here. But one of the pluses for 2010 is that I played more gigs this year than I have in a long, long time. From about August until now, I was playing nearly every weekend with at least one of the four bands I’m involved in. It has reminded me how much I really enjoy playing music. And I’ve met some really great players, that were under my radar until recently.
On the photo side of things, it has been a fairly quiet fall. I shot the Joe Nichols shows in September and November, a couple of corporate headshot sessions, and the Hines Farm benefit, but that’s been about it. A few weeks back, a realtor friend of mine asked me to photograph a couple of unique listings of his. He realized that the typical realtor-shot images of the interiors wouldn’t do these homes justice, and felt my skills with the camera could help generate more interest in these properties.
The two homes were quite different from each other.
One was a large, early 20th century home in Toledo’s Old West End area and featured custom wood trim and built-ins. Because of its historic nature, it still retained the original wallpaper in the dining room as well as a few original Tiffany lamps. The dark wood and limited lighting in this stately home posed a challenge in my attempt to get proper, consistent exposures in many of the rooms.
The other listing was more typical of the newer, larger suburban homes found in many areas around the country. It was originally a builder’s home and the numerous custom features found throughout, were indicative of this. Numerous customized tray ceilings, a built-in desk in the study, lighted art niches, and the dramatic two-story entry all proved this was no cookie-cutter subdivision clone. 
While the lighter decor and more elaborate lighting in this home helped my images, I was constantly struggling to capture the drama of the custom ceilings in many rooms. Using an extremely wide-angle lens helped get more area in the frame, but it also started to distort the vertical and horizontal lines of the highly detailed ceiling designs.
Initial interest in these listings has been very high, according to my realtor friend. I hope these properties do well for him – it’s been a tough couple of years in the real estate industry.
Last week, I had the chance to visit briefly with my son again, while they were on a tour stop at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI. And while I love shooting Chris at work, along with Joe Nichols and his band (The “We Ain’t Got No Damn Band Randys”), I decided not to do much of that this trip. After all, I’ve already shot about ten or eleven of Joe’s shows over the last couple years, with pretty much unlimited access.
So I didn’t feel like I would be shooting anything new or unique at this show. Plus, my wife was with me and I didn’t feel like deserting her for an hour or so, to go run around the arena shooting Joe’s set. Instead, I shot a few band images from back near the sound board, as well as a few of Chris at work in front of a large Midas console. (It was incredibly dark near the sound board, so I had my camera’s ISO cranked to about 4000 for some shots of Chris, resulting in fairly noisy images.)
But like any photog worth his salt, I couldn’t just sit through the warm-up act with my camera gear sitting idly by. The opener was a singer-songwriter from Atlanta named Sonia Leigh. Honestly, I had never heard of her, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Let’s just say, I think you’ll be hearing her name in music circles quite a bit more in the future. She’s a young, scrappy, tomboy-ish little thing with a voice bigger than her diminutive frame would suggest.
As I started shooting her set, I tried to dissect her musical influences, and more specifically, which other singers she reminded me of. I detected (in no particular order) Melissa Etheridge, a little Indigo Girls, a touch of Bonnie Raitt, a splash of Janis Joplin, maybe some Tanya Tucker, a little Sheryl Crow, some Brandi Carlile, and much more. Her songs covered the usually country fare – livin’, lovin’, drinkin’, fast cars, and broken hearts. The basic band (guitar, bass, drums) behind her smoky voice and acoustic guitar, was a natural fit for her no-frills music.
She won over the crowd pretty early on, and seemed to keep them entertained for the duration of the set. I moved around the middle of the arena floor shooting Sonia and the band. While I could have pushed my way through the crowd to the front of the stage, I didn’t really feel I could have gotten any better images there. It’s always interesting and exciting shooting an act I have never heard – I think it causes me to pay more attention to the performers to try and predict what will happen next. I felt I walked away from venue with some pretty solid shots, and I learned about a new, up-and-coming artist in the process.
The full photo gallery of images from the show can be seen at my website.
First off, pardon the extended radio silence on this blog. But honestly, I haven’t felt like there was much going on that would interest anyone. So rather than blab on about nothing, I chose to keep things on the down-low for a bit.
A couple weeks back, I found out about a blues show / tribute / birthday party happening at an area club called Griffin’s Hines Farm. While I had never been to the venue, I had heard quite a bit about it over the years – how it was THE PLACE for blues in the region. It was also home to performances and visits by such blues legends as Bobby Blue Bland, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. (For more info on Hines Farm, check out the recent article in the Toledo City Paper.)
In the process of researching the November 6th show, I discovered a musical friend of mine, Larry Gold, would also be playing one of the sets that night. So with that extra incentive, I made a firm decision to check out Hines Farm. Like any photographer worth his salt, I decided to bring along some camera gear to practice my craft with my favorite subject matter – live music.
Once things got rolling with the music that night, and I started shooting, many of the details became a blur for me. I often get so “focused” on what I’m doing that I develop a sort of sensory tunnel vision, where time and space tend to evaporate. I’ve shot hour-long sets of performers and, afterwards, couldn’t tell you the names of more than a couple songs they played. What I do know is, several groups played while I was there, and I didn’t catch any of the names – I was just immersed in the visuals. (check the marquee photo for the line-up)
If you ever get a chance to catch some live music at Hines Farm Blues Club, don’t waste the opportunity. Even if you’re not a huge fan of the blues, you’ll dig the no-frills, down-home, roadhouse feel of the joint. And although I didn’t sample any that night, I’ve heard they have outstanding BBQ there as well.
I’ve included a few shots from that evening in this blog post, but you can see the full gallery at my website. I hope you enjoy them.
Once again, I had the opportunity to hang out with my son and the rest of the Joe Nichols band and crew during a recent show in Ohio. Sure, I enjoyed visiting with everyone and shooting the concert. But I was also asked to shoot a few artist endorsement photos with several of the band and crew with various pieces of gear that they use. These photos are typically used on a manufacturer’s website or in printed catalogs, showcasing their product being used by a touring musician. I had done a couple of these (Egnater Amplification and Flatline Guitars) during my last hang with the JN gang and they were received quite well.
So, below are some of the endorsement images I shot that afternoon, after soundcheck but before the show.
Wes with one of his cases by Alcorn
Michael endorsing Armor Gold Cables
Chris with the Digidesign SC-48 Console
Wes with his Pearl drum kit
Dave and his Open Labs DBeat
OK, I know it’s been quite awhile since I posted here – about a month. My apologies to those yearning for regular content updates, but the truth is I haven’t much interesting stuff happening in my life lately. So rather than bore you with what I had for dinner, or what color socks I wore on any given day, I opted for just laying low and not cluttering up the internets with useless drivel. (If only others would abide by that rule. But I digress… )
As you know, we are all products of our environments and our influences. Musically, I had a pretty broad range of inspiration to draw from, and I soaked it all up like a sponge. As I began to write music at around age 9 or 10, I started to unknowingly incorporate various styles into my music. Many of these influences wouldn’t become obvious to me until much later. (Perhaps the most impactful influence on my bass playing wouldn’t become apparent until almost 40 years after I was first exposed to his playing – Motown Funk Brother, James Jamerson. But that’s a whole blog post in itself.) Reviewing this material dozens of years later, it is much easier for me to pick the specific licks, progressions, or styles that I was injecting into my work. Maybe it was a certain guitar tone (from a Steely Dan song), or a production technique (like a slap-back echo, made popular in the late 70s and early 80s), or certain chord progression (from a 1979 Neil Larsen record called High Gear.) I was browsing through some old recording I had made in my teens and early 20s, and I stumbled across a few things that caught my ear.
Neil Larsen "High Gear" album cover
When I was about 23, I was working at a small video & audio production facility in Toledo. We had started to do some industrial videos and were in search of some background music to use behind the voice-overs. My boss at the time, knowing of my musical background, suggested we rent some drum machines and keyboards and let me mess around for a week or so to see what I could come up with. Well, I don’t know that I created anything really useful for that purpose, but I did compose a few little tunes that were kind of interesting. Keep in mind this was about 1983 or 1984, and I was working by myself with a 16-track tape machine, a couple of keyboards that I barely knew how to operate, and of course, my über-lame keyboard skillz.
One of the pieces I came up with was a latin-jazz flavored, keyboard-centric tune I called “Latin Lovelies”. (I have no clue how I came up with that title.) Listening to it recently, it is blatantly obvious that it I was listening to a 1979 Neil Larsen album called “High Gear” around that time. Both pieces are posted here for your listening (dis)pleasure – see if you notice any similarities. Obviously, the playing skills are not one of those similarities.
“Latin Lovelies” – ©Jon Diener
Excerpt from “High Gear” – Neil Larsen
Here’s another piece I found that was written and recorded around the same year. This one was put together in my makeshift home studio on a 4-track Tascam PortaStudio, which used standard cassette tapes as the recording media. I remember the seed for this song was a drum machine pattern I stumbled upon, which reminded me of Pat Benetar’s “Love is a Battlefield”, which was popular around that time. I started adding guitar parts and experimenting with progressions until I came up with what you hear below. I think some of the guitar lines are reminiscent of Jeff Beck’s style, which was a big influence on me since the mid 70s. Let me be clear that I am in no way comparing my playing to Jeff Beck – I just remember trying to emulate his stylings when recording this. See if you can pick out these influences in the tune I called, appropriately enough, “Beck’s Battlefield.”
“Beck’s Battlefield” – ©Jon Diener
If I run across any more examples of my musical influences manifesting themselves in my music, I’ll be sure to post them here.
