Andrew St. Clair

I had been begging to shoot LCD Soundsystem’s last show at MSG. But sadly, it wasn’t in the cards. However, I got to shoot night 3 of their 4 night residency at Terminal 5. As it turns out, I probably had more fun shooting at T5 than I would have at MSG.

I had friends attending the concert who got there early enough that they were up against the barricade. BV commenters know one of them very well. Ahmad/AKA: frohawk is always at shows and we’ve struck a friendship. My plan was to join them, or get as close as possible, after my pit time expired. This would also give me the opportunity to shoot the band some more. I hung out on the rooftop area drinking some cheap beers (they had a 3 dollar special) with a couple other friends. At 7:45, I decided to head to the photo pit, since the opener, Shit Robot, was going on at 8pm.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot Shit Robot close up because his set started about 15 minutes early… which means I got to the pit late and I only had about 4 minutes to shoot close up. Shooting Shit Robot was a bit of a challenge. It’s basically a guy wearing a neon-like face mask that looks like a robot head. Most DJs are pretty boring to shoot; But, What made his set interesting to shoot were the visuals being projected on the screen surrounding him. So I ended up shooting his set mostly from the 3rd floor.

Then it was time for LCD Soundsystem. Nice bright lights. But they were off and on, bright and brighter. So I needed to keep adjusting my ISO, and f stop. The pit wasn’t very crowded either. I think there weren’t more than 6 photographers and that was including myself.

So, after my pit time ended, I hit the ‘party deck’ on the 3rd floor. The lighting was pretty bright at times, so I broke out my Sigma 70-300m f/4-5.6 to get some close ups of James Murphy. Shooting at 300mm with 50 people dancing so hard it was shaking the floor is not an easy task. I’m lucky the above picture came out so sharp. BTW, it was taken at ISO 500 at 1/200 sec.

After the first of three sets had ended, I decided to try and make my way to the front of the crowd on the floor so I could get the eventual crowd surfers and some shots of the band with the audience in the foreground.

I’m not a die hard LCD fan, but I can definitely say it was a great show. A friend afterwards, who traveled from Chicago to see the show, said that she couldn’t believe it was a $40 concert. “4 hours of music at 10 Dollars an hour.” Check out my photos log with a review by Bill Pearis on BrooklynVegan.com