Sports and travel/nature photography aren’t something I’m experienced with, but they scratched an itch that helped rejuvenate my love for music photography, and taught me some valuable lessons that will certainly help make me a better photographer in the years ahead. Here’s to more stretching in 2020.
But what about the shows I did shoot? Well, there was a few less of them this year than in previous years, but one benefit of being more focused was that I tended to be more selective about the artists I did photograph. There weren’t many shows this year where I went home feeling like I had wasted a perfectly good evening. I also had the chance to shoot a few repeats from previous years, and discover a few new favorites along the way.
Sometimes I pick shows to shoot out of a sense of nostalgia as much as anything, and this year I had one of those shows: David Gray at the Fox Theater. It would not be an overstatement to say that David’s music, beginning with his breakout LP White Ladder, was the soundtrack to my early years living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember discovering White Ladder at the Virgin Megastore in downtown San Francisco (R.I.P.), and I quickly became a huge fan, devouring all his records. One of my first dates with my wife was to see David play at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, at the peak of his popularity, and sadly that was the last time I saw him live until this year.
When he released new music and announced a tour that would take him through Oakland, I had to be there to get photos. And I was pleased to find that he hasn’t slowed down in all the years that had passed since I last saw him. If anything, I was caught off guard by his joy and exuberance. He’s impossible not to love!