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Breaking Benjamin – June 15, 2007

I have finally uploaded the pictures that I took at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater of the Breaking Benjamin concert to my gallery. I once again used a Canon 20D with a Canon 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM lens, but this time I used a Canon 50mm F1.4 on my Canon Rebel XT. Having the F1.4 allowed me to maintain a fast shutter speed, mostly 1/320s, while shooting at 800 ISO, compared to 1600 ISO on the F2.8 lens. I was unable to shoot from behind the barricade like last time, so I had to shoot from the pit, which was not easy. I had to really watch the equipment to protect it and also so I did not hit anyone with it.

Keep reading to see some of my favorite images and what went into processing the images.

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Version 9.0 – I Think

Welcome to Version 9.0 of artimeg.com, of which only some have actually gone live. I have been working on this redesign for a month or 2 now. There are quite a few new features. As you can see the top of the homepage now displays some of my work and will be updated when I can. At the bottom is a section of recent photos, which are randomly pulled from the gallery. Under that I am displaying my most recent tweets from twitter. (Currently not working for some reason. Seems to be working now, must have been a twitter issue.)

I am now using tags on my posts, although I need to go back through all of my old posts and reorganize the categories and tags.

Also, on the to-do list is clean up the css a bit. I need to do some organization and find any unnecessary code, but that will have to come later.

I promise this weekend I will finally get pictures up from the Breaking Benjamin’s St. Louis, MO show from June 15th. OK, so I got busy this weekend and did not have time to edit the images, but I have started the process and will get them up ASAP. The images are finally up.

California Trip

This post is extremely late, but I guess it’s better late than never. If you don’t know last month I went out to California for a weekend. The original plan was to see Breaking Benjamin play in Reno, NV, but the plan fell though when the concert was canceled. My tickets were already bought so I was still gonna head out to California. Dave, the guy who runs the Breaking Benjamin site was the one who was flying me out there.

I was hoping that Apple would release the Core 2 Duo Macbooks before I left and they did, but I didn’t have time to buy online so I could use my NAPP discount. I decided it was worth it to me to just go ahead and go out to an Apple store and buy one anyway. On November 9th I went to the West County Apple store in St. Louis and picked up a White Macbook. This is my first Mac and I am loving it so far, hopefully more on that in a later post.

I woke up around 4am on November 10th to catch my 6:15am flight. It took about 15 minutes to get through security. I only had a 15 minute wait or so once I got to my gate. I boarded the plane and we left on time. This flight wasn’t a non-stop, so I had a stop in Denver, then I got another flight to Sacramento, CA. On the way to Denver I watched Tommy Boy, a classic. 🙂 it wasn’t full, so I had an entire row to myself. It was nice on the flight When I got to Denver, CO I decided to see if I could get on the wireless and boo to Denver. You have to pay to use their wireless, so I didn’t bother. On the flight to Sacramento it was full. I watched Black Sheep. I guess I was in a Chris Farley and David Spade mood.

Once I got to the Sacramento airport I got a call from Kat who is Dave’s wife saying that she was on her way to come get me. I waited outside the airport waiting for them and when I saw Elvis, their dog, I knew it was them. I had never met Dave or Kat in person before.

We went back to their house, where I met Dave for the first time. We hung out and just talked for awhile while we waited for Chris’s flight to arrive. Chris is another one of the guys I work with on the Breaking Benjamin site. We all went to go pick him up at the airport then we went to the33rd Street Bistro to eat. While we were waiting outside this homeless guy comes up saying he works for the CIA. He asked if we wanted to know what they call him, we said sure, he says he is known as the “Rocketman”. He told us he was in an accident, so he could “rocket” much anymore. Needless to say that was an interesting way to start things off.

We went back to their house after we finished eating. The rest of the night was mainly just spent hanging out. Jim also came by from the Breaking Benjamin site.

On Saturday Dan came by and we all went bowling, which I hadn’t done in years. I bowled horribly, probably the worst I ever had. I don’t even recall how low it was. That night we played some Texas Hold Em. I won, too bad we weren’t playing for money.

On Sunday Dave took Chris, Jim and me down to San Francisco. Things are definitely different out on the West Coast compared to the Midwest. I had my Canon Rebel XT and a 70-200mm F2.8L IS lens, which belongs to the photographer I work with. We went and saw the Golden Gate bridge, of course. Then we went down to Haight Street, now that was different. I got asked if I could spare some cash so this guy could get a sex change operation. I am gonna go with, no. We walked around there for a little while. We then drive down the windy road, Lombard Street. Next was a trip up to Coit Tower. Jim and me decided to pay the ~$5 to go up in the tower. The view was great from up there and I was able to snap some good pictures. We made one more stop before heading back. We stopped at Treasure Island. It was dark by this point, but the view was excellent back on San Francisco. I only had a monopod so it was extremely hard to get any good shots. Out of 20+ I maybe got one good one.

I had a 10am flight, so the next morning I was up around 8am. Dave took me to the airport, which is an extremely small airport. One real nice thing is free wifi at the airport. It was a full flight once again on my flight to Denver. I watched episodes of the third season of Arrested Development, great show. Had about a 90 minutes layover in Denver, so I had to try and find an outlet, not an easy task. Watched some more episodes while I waited for my flight and on the way home to St. Louis.

I would first like to thank Dave and Kat for inviting me out. They are both 2 of the nicest people I have ever met.

I had a great time in California, but I realized I am definitely a Midwest kinda guy, lol.

I will work on getting my pictures into the gallery tomorrow, but it is currently 1am, so it will have to wait. I shot Raw only, so the files still need to be processed.

breakingbenjamin.com / shallowbay.com

temporary shallowbay.comI joined shallowbay.com a couple years ago and after awhile I was added to the team that runs the site. Early this year we became the official site for breaking benjamin. This meant that I had to quicky as in one night design a brand new site for breaking benjamin. Once again I used wordpress as the CMS / blog for the site. This was a very lite and temporary site that was up from the time of taking over as the official site until the current site was launched back on August 1st. I was responsable for handling all of the CSS/xHTML work and also designing all of the graphics.

shallowbay.com forums

Once I had the main site done it was time to tackle the forums. The forum software used is vBulletin and this was my first time ever diving into vB. For being a very complex piece of software the customization was actually very easy. Included with the vB customizing was recoloring all of the vB icons to match the brown style of the new vB theme.

breaking benjamin myspace As much as I hate myspace it is an extremely valuable tool. With the help of some work on myspace done by Mike Davidson I was able to get a matching myspace layout done. There are so many little tips and tricks needed to make myspace behave, so it quickly gave me a headache. One of the biggest issues with myspace is having to try and figure out how to style just certain aspects of the page. This usually winds up with code like “table table table td” and then you just hope that it does not screw up any other parts of the page that you do not want affected.

Now that I had all of the breaking benjamin sites updated and completed it was time to begin thinking about the new site that had to go up before the cd release.

shallowbay.com

For the current design I had very little to do with the actual design. I was mainly just responsible for the behind the scenes coding fo the site. Although I did do some work to polish up some of the graphics on the site. Transforming the site to the new design was a fairly easy process thanks to CSS and the easy customization of wordpress.

Things got pretty scary in late July. We had some storms that knocked the power out at my house, which caused my computer to shut down and fried one of my hard drives. It took my a day or two of messing with the computer to realize that that one drive was the cause for the rest of my IDE drives to not be found. Once I found that out I removed the drive and I was able to get back to work. Trouble did not end there. About a week or 2 later we had more, even bigger, storms. The storms came on Wednesday, but I lucked out and did not lose power, but on Friday morning we had another big storm roll through and that is when I lost power. At this point I am wonering just what else can go wrong. I was frantically trying to come up with how I am gonna finish the new site in time without power. Luckily the power came back on Saturday morning.

Over the next couple days from Saturday to Monday, when the new site was launched, I had put in over 25+ hours to basically build the entire site. Needless to say things were a little fantic.

shallowbay.com forums For the forums I once again I skinned vB to match the new site. This time I went through and designed my own icons that matched the theme a quite bit better than the generic vB icons.

breaking benjamin myspace

Lastly, I got to tackled myspace again. This time things were not so bad. All I had to do was change a few images and the color scheme and I was done.

The sites have been up for a few weeks now and I had really been wanting to write about them, but things have been crazy as usual. Doing these sites did provide me with the opportunity to photograph breaking benjamin at Pointfest 19 in St. Louis, MO. See my previous post for more on that. Don’t forget to check out my breaking benjamin pictures in the gallery.

Pointfest 2006

First I would like to thank Freddie!!! (Tour manager for Breaking Benjamin.) I gave him a call and he hooked me up with a photo pass and allowed me to shoot during the entire set.

I had pit tickets because I did not know Freddie was gonna be hooking me up, but I did not use them. Along with the photo pass Freddie got us seats. Very good seats too, 3rd row.

Me and my friend got there about 4:30pm, I gave Freddie a call and he said my pass would be waiting up front for me. Originally I was supposed to get a backstage pass, but Freddie said he could not do it.

BB is pretty much the only band I wanted to see, so I was mainly just hanging around until their set.

After 3 days grace I went down to the front barricade. I asked the security guy if I was allowed behind the barricade and he said sure. He then said usually they only allow photos for the first 3 songs. I only him that Freddie said I could shoot the whole show. He said he would go check on that for me. Another guy who had a radio came by and asked my name, he went to go check with Freddie and he said I was good to shoot the whole thing, thank you Freddie.

While I was waiting for BB behind the barricade I met Adron, the web guy from the point. He was a really nice guy and a big BB fan.

I work at a photography studio, so I was able to use some of our equipment. I have a Canon DigitalRebel XT and I used a wide angle lens on that one, 11-18mm. Then I borrowed a Canon 20D along with a Canon 70-200mm f2.8/L lens.

This was my first time trying to photogrpah a concert and I must say it was extremely challenging. I took a total of 251 pictures, not all turned out. I am still working on fixing them up and everything, but I added some to my gallery.

Ben gave a big shout out to TSB. He said we rock and the old HR site sucked.

In case anyone is wondering, I was the guy rocking out behind the barricade in the grey BB shirt. One of the security guys was like dude you are supposed to be taking pictures not having fun, ha!

After BB me and my friend left. I have seen Staind many times before and they are nothing special live.

Please take a look at some of the pictures that I took of Breaking Benjamin at Pointfest.