My wife and I attended the Greg Laurie Chicago Harvest 2010 Concert on Sunday evening which featured recording artists The Katinas, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Jeremy Camp. The event was held at The Allstate Arena in Rosemont, IL.
The arena was packed with people. We arrived at 4:30 PM and already people were streaming in for the 6:00 PM concert. Originally, we were going to sit closer to the stage, but to do that, we would have to sit to the sides of the stage which would force us to look at an angle the entire time. We didn't want to do that, so we moved to the balcony area all the way on the opposite side of the stage. The problem with that was it meant that I would be photographing the event at the absolute farthest distance from the stage!
Armed with my Nikon D3 and Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VR lens, I settled in on what I knew would be a difficult photoshoot. The distance was greater than I really should have been which meant that any closeup shots of the performers would mean having to crop the images in Photoshop. If you look at the wide shots of the concert, you can see how small the performers looked. Actually many of these "wide" shots are actually the 200 mm shots! So you can imagine the amount of cropping that was needed to make closeups of the shots you see here of Steven Curtis Chapman!
Like most other concerts, the volume level was very loud, but both my wife and I wore ear plugs. I'm always prepared with ear plugs as I wear them at every single wedding reception I attend. I often have to stand literally in front of the DJ's speakers at the receptions just to get my shots, I learned early on that ear protection was a MUST for wedding photography! So for this concert, we both brought along some hearing protection. We agreed that it was the smart thing to do.
We left before the concert was over because my wife needed to get up early in the morning and we did not have the ability to stay too late. Being way up at the top of the stadium and with a capacity crowd, we knew it would be nearly impossible to get out of the building quickly and even worse to get out of the parking lot in any timely manner. So as the Katinas were coming back on stage to perform again, we decided to leave. We missed the end of the event where they did their "altar call" asking for people to come down to to make their commitments to become Christians. (edit note: Someone sent me a note to ask if I knew that the intent of this concert was to bring people to Christ and if that was important to me... and the answer is yes... I knew that, but we had to leave early, so we had to miss the end. We have both already made our commitments many years ago. While it would have been nice to stay to see the Altar Call, we just did not have the luxury of time that evening.)
Interestingly, as I was heading out of the arena and into the hallway, the gentleman who was sitting behind me came running out and stopped me to inquire if he could purchase some of my photos! I handed him a business card and asked him to email me. I had not intended on selling any of the images I captured from this event as it was only really intended for myself and for this blog, but I decided to let him order some if he wanted them.
Be sure to click on each image here to see a larger version.
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