Roots and Boots with Aaron Tippin, Sammy Kershaw, and Joe Diffie 16 March 2013

The Chandler Center for the Arts was the setting for a concert featuring country music greats Aaron Tippin, Sammy Kershaw, and Joe Diffie. 

Before the concert, we went to the SanTan Brewing Company, just south of the concert arena.  First off, yes the beer was tasty.  I had the hefeweizen which is a muddy wheat beer.  Many Americans are turned off to the dirty look of the beer, but I find it quite refreshing.  The food was quite good too.  French fries never tasted as good.  This blog is not about the brew pub, but I was very excited to visit this place as I had done a photo essay of brew pubs last summer in Santa Fe and wanted to do one for my home state of Arizona.  The manager gave me a road map to the so-called Arizona Ale Trail, which will be quite helpful to me this coming summer.  If you are in the Chandler area, I strong suggest you visit!

Now back to the concert. 

This venue presented some obvious lighting challenges.  Most of these concerts won’t let a photographer take in “professional” cameras, so I took my pocket Canon S100 with me.  I have a lot of control over aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.  I also can shoot in raw with this camera.  Still, you are going to see some areas that are overexposed and some under exposed.  It’s pretty hard to rescue that with Photoshop CS6 or any of the plugins I use such as Nik, OnOne, and Topaz. 

I edited all photos at first in Lightroom 4.  Sometimes all I needed to do was crop and touch on clarity.  Other times I used Silver Efex Pro from Nik to convert to black and white or OnOne’s Perfect black and white on the final goodbye shot of the three country crooners. 

Next photo adventure up for me is the Cave Creek Rodeo!  Look for a new blog post soon.

And remember, Just Shut Up and Shoot!

Jim Patterson

http://JamesGordonPatterson.com

Click HERE to see all the photos from the Roots and Boots concert