For me, home is where the studio is – and vice versa. The bands I shoot portraits of sometimes are only in town for the night, and I guess I’m not famous enough yet for them to move their concerts to where I work, so it has to be the other way around. I bring my studio wherever they set up camp and/or stage, be that inside or outside. Naturally, therefore, my gear all needs to be collapsible, light, and durable.
Light
One advantage of taking photos at concerts is that you don’t have to worry about light, it’s all done for you. When in the studio or on location taking photos of a band, I bring my own little lightshow.
My go-to flashlights are Nikon SB-900s, but other than Nikon advertises it, I don’t use them with their built-in IR sync. I like to bury lights inside of and behind things, and using radio sync that doesn’t ask for line of sight (i.e. Pocket Wizards) solves that problem.
As for color, that’s a war inside my head. One part of me wants to make everything colorful and YEAH! and MTV and 80ies, and the other part of me wants to keep everything as natural and clean and ambient-light-looking as possible. I’ve got the equipment for both of these worlds: Heaploads of differently colored gels and modifiers (mostly my own creations made of cardboard and black tape) that add or remove this and that twist to light as well as your “traditional” beauty/soft light equipment like umbrellas and reflectors.
Backgrounds
I like to build my own sets and props, but if I intend to take a portrait on seamless white, I need to get the seamless white to be, well, as seamless and white as I can. I never use wrinkly stuff like muslin – my favorite backgrounds are paper. The rolls can get quite heavy and bulky (thankfully, I know how to drive a car the length of a small ship if need be), but there’s nothing flatter than paper that’s freshly unrolled.
Plus, as I said above, I like to tinker quite a bit for my setups, so instead of ruining a muslin background, I paint on paper that was made to be used only once in the first place.
I also found a very sturdy, while collapsible (and thus transportable) stand for my photo background paper rolls. Also comes in very handy to hang various things onto, like jackets, flashes, or unruly people ;-) . If the location and my means of transport allows the space for it, I always bring it it – if not, I use my favorite weapon/tool for just about anything: Gaffer Tape. If you can’t fix it with Gaffer Tape, you just haven’t used enough yet…
Tethered Shooting
Way back when I had a Canon 20d, I used to curse about how small the viewfinder was. I could never see the edges of the frame I was shooting. Nikon solved that problem for me: Both the D3 and the D700 have a very decent viewfinder. They also have very decent displays that can show me an approximation to what the photo I’ve just taken looks like, but there’s nothing like a big screen like the one of your laptop or iMac to see your photos on.
With the arrival of Adobe Lightroom 3, all it takes for that now is a USB cable. I can even trigger the shutter release by clicking the mouse button instead of the shutter release – and I and my clients, the makeup artist, and everyone else gets a very good look at the photos on a big screen and is able to make adjustments and comments as they (or I) like immediately.
Batteries
Simply put, you can never have enough. For every battery any of my devices needs, I have a backup, and then a backup for the backup. For my Nikon D700, I bring the battery grip even if the first battery is fully charged. You just never know what happens, and which battery’s going to die on you next.
The Nikon SB-900 flashes and the Pocket Wizard radio transmitters both run on AA batteries. My Nikon D700 can run on AA batteries if need be. And of course, the batteries in all of them usually die one after another during a single shooting – a situation which I just want to avoid at all cost.
Well, not quite at all cost. I carry quite a number of SB900s (and therefore, Pocked Wizards) with me, and carrying replacement batteries for all of them with me on top of the ones I have to bring anyway doesn’t make a lot of sense, also from an environmental standpoint. So for those, I use rechargeable batteries.
Needless to say that when I come home from a studio or location photo shooting, my first task is to get them all recharged. My desk usually looks like a disco with all the chargers’ LEDs blinking.