I shot the Flaming Lips once before at Walnut Creek. You can check that shoot out at raleighmusic.com under the “Warren Scott” concert photography section, my alias at the time.
As I guessed, photographing Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips was an exercise in figuring out how to do it as you do it, before you done it so you have time to do it.You might smell the furious nature of a concert shoot a little with this one. It had a furious feel to it to me. I was climbing up the audience barrier, hanging by one hand being a bit pro-active for this one. I’m usually the oldest one in the hall. Sometimes I think I scare people.The bands publicist’s rules were to shoot 3 songs, with only one photographer to shoot each song. (Only room for one photographer because of the set-up).  It seemed to be a totally proper psychedelic game plan, so I took slot two. The first three of us got there on the early side, a fourth photographer got there much later.  I’m not sure how he had worked that all out as I booked after my song.
I aim to tell the story on your behalf to put you in the room with the performance, so I like to shoot the room as much as I can and brought the ‘ole trusty trio: 3 old Canon 5D2 bodies, and the Canon 14mm, 15mm Fisheye, and 16-35. The first three of us guys took songs 1, 2 and 3 and as I was number 2 (as usual), this gave me time to dial in a general light reading during song #1.  But I was still nervous with this chaotic light I was seeing, so I dialed things further down to 325 shutter speed at 2.8, with an ISO of 800 on all three bodies.
I only had to check once on one body that it wasn’t blowing out in the skin tones, so I never had to check exposures again during this one song. -Sometimes this is a grave mistake on a shoot if I knock something off in my settings on one of the bodies. Things going way too fast to play with settings, so I tape everything down I can to stop this from happening. Luckily, it worked this time.