Here's something you might be interested in.
Dan Chusid is showing up more and more in publications and online in the small print around the margins of concert images of rock stars. A music photographer, the bulk of Chusid’s assignment work is done for Sound Diego (NBC.com) but he says he’s presently shooting covers for the Troubadour.
In recent months Chusid, 59, has shot concerts by a local band called Little Hurricane, and national acts the Damned, Dave Mason, Chris Cornell, Morrissey, George Thorogood, and Kenny Wayne Sheppard. It is a job that pays little he says, but it is a job that is not without its perks including a hug from Bonnie Raitt and some airport hang time with Mick Jagger. And then, there was the kiss.
“I shoot IndieFest (in Pt. Loma at Liberty Station) every year. The year Juliette Lewis was headlining, I was standing in the pit and watching her performance through my viewfinder, and I saw her waving me toward the stage.” He thought she was ready for her close up, as they say, but Chusid was mistaken. “She pushed the camera out of the way, and then she kissed me in front of all those people. After it was all over, I asked the other photographers in the pit if they got the shot.” No. They did not.
Chusid is an East Coast native but lives in Santee and works his days doing commercial property maintenance. Since shooting concerts is a night job, does he power nap? No. “I make my own hours,” he says, “and I’m late a lot.” Right now, he’s logging shutter miles by shooting as many live shows as he can squeeze in after work. He’d like to turn pro.
During the late 1970s Chusid worked at a place where they make those gold and platinum record awards for the recording industry. He says they never used the actual record that won. As long as it had the same number of tracks on the side facing out of the frame as the winner it was good to go. After plating, re-labeling, and framing nobody would know the difference anyway, he says, a theory that was tested once when a famous recipient got drunk, smashed the frame, played his gold record, and learned that it was a junk salsa disc culled from a record shop’s cut-out bin.
“We made those awards for Michael Jackson, Meat Loaf, the Beatles, and a lot of other big-label bands,” says Chusid. “We didn’t do the Rolling Stones, though.”
On the side, Chusid runs an online website under the Meet Up umbrella called the Music Photographer’s Lounge, a group he initiated three months ago. It’s an Internet place to compare notes about gear (for the record, Chusid is a Cannon man and depends on his 24-70mm f2.8 and his 70-200mm f2.8 to get those arresting live images he is becoming known for) and possibly to gripe about things like the limited access shooters have to their famous subjects any more. But it wasn’t always that way.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when rock and roll was new and the business side hadn’t quite developed, photographers roamed about on assignment unchecked. Images from that period are considered iconic by today’s standards, but less for the skill of the photographer than for the subject matter: Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar, Janice Joplin wearing only a necklace, Mick Jagger applying mascara. The photographers who snapped those images, shooters like Henry Diltz, Annie Leibovitz, Mick Rock, Jim Marshall, and a handful more had one thing in common that today’s concert shooters do not: they had all-access.
Concert photographers now compete for limited access granted by media hacks. They work from the pit down in front of the band, which is invariably jammed with dozens of other shooters ranging from free neighborhood weeklies and junior college rags, or, they work from the sound board riser which is generally stationed a hundred yards out in dead center. It is a hard environment in which to be creative. Either way, you get three songs, says Chusid, “and then you have to leave.”
Then again, sometimes the three-song-and-go scheme works in a rock photographer’s favor. “I was photographing the Farmers at the Belly Up and Corbin [Turner,] the guy in the band who kind of channels Country Dick? He was on stage holding a beer and for whatever reason he decides to spit it out all over the audience.” By then, Chusid was out of the pit. “He just missed me.”
Dan Chusid is showing up more and more in publications and online in the small print around the margins of concert images of rock stars. A music photographer, the bulk of Chusid’s assignment work is done for Sound Diego (NBC.com) but he says he’s presently shooting covers for the Troubadour.
In recent months Chusid, 59, has shot concerts by a local band called Little Hurricane, and national acts the Damned, Dave Mason, Chris Cornell, Morrissey, George Thorogood, and Kenny Wayne Sheppard. It is a job that pays little he says, but it is a job that is not without its perks including a hug from Bonnie Raitt and some airport hang time with Mick Jagger. And then, there was the kiss.
“I shoot IndieFest (in Pt. Loma at Liberty Station) every year. The year Juliette Lewis was headlining, I was standing in the pit and watching her performance through my viewfinder, and I saw her waving me toward the stage.” He thought she was ready for her close up, as they say, but Chusid was mistaken. “She pushed the camera out of the way, and then she kissed me in front of all those people. After it was all over, I asked the other photographers in the pit if they got the shot.” No. They did not.
Chusid is an East Coast native but lives in Santee and works his days doing commercial property maintenance. Since shooting concerts is a night job, does he power nap? No. “I make my own hours,” he says, “and I’m late a lot.” Right now, he’s logging shutter miles by shooting as many live shows as he can squeeze in after work. He’d like to turn pro.
During the late 1970s Chusid worked at a place where they make those gold and platinum record awards for the recording industry. He says they never used the actual record that won. As long as it had the same number of tracks on the side facing out of the frame as the winner it was good to go. After plating, re-labeling, and framing nobody would know the difference anyway, he says, a theory that was tested once when a famous recipient got drunk, smashed the frame, played his gold record, and learned that it was a junk salsa disc culled from a record shop’s cut-out bin.
“We made those awards for Michael Jackson, Meat Loaf, the Beatles, and a lot of other big-label bands,” says Chusid. “We didn’t do the Rolling Stones, though.”
On the side, Chusid runs an online website under the Meet Up umbrella called the Music Photographer’s Lounge, a group he initiated three months ago. It’s an Internet place to compare notes about gear (for the record, Chusid is a Cannon man and depends on his 24-70mm f2.8 and his 70-200mm f2.8 to get those arresting live images he is becoming known for) and possibly to gripe about things like the limited access shooters have to their famous subjects any more. But it wasn’t always that way.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when rock and roll was new and the business side hadn’t quite developed, photographers roamed about on assignment unchecked. Images from that period are considered iconic by today’s standards, but less for the skill of the photographer than for the subject matter: Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar, Janice Joplin wearing only a necklace, Mick Jagger applying mascara. The photographers who snapped those images, shooters like Henry Diltz, Annie Leibovitz, Mick Rock, Jim Marshall, and a handful more had one thing in common that today’s concert shooters do not: they had all-access.
Concert photographers now compete for limited access granted by media hacks. They work from the pit down in front of the band, which is invariably jammed with dozens of other shooters ranging from free neighborhood weeklies and junior college rags, or, they work from the sound board riser which is generally stationed a hundred yards out in dead center. It is a hard environment in which to be creative. Either way, you get three songs, says Chusid, “and then you have to leave.”
Then again, sometimes the three-song-and-go scheme works in a rock photographer’s favor. “I was photographing the Farmers at the Belly Up and Corbin [Turner,] the guy in the band who kind of channels Country Dick? He was on stage holding a beer and for whatever reason he decides to spit it out all over the audience.” By then, Chusid was out of the pit. “He just missed me.”