Blog Blender

Rock Gods – Forty Years of Rock Photography

, , ,

Rock Gods: Forty Years of Rock Photography by Robert M. Knight is a diverse collection of photos that span his entire career. He’s taken pictures of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck and many more.

He focuses on lead guitarists, and his body of work shows that, especially with his live concert shots. Knight excels at the live concert photography. He says his approach is like a journalist or someone doing a documentary, where looking at the photos afterward they come to life in a more visceral way.

In Rock Gods, he tells stories about some of his memorable shoots. Greeting Led Zeppelin in Hawaii as they walk off they plane carrying the master reels to Led Zeppelin II. Meeting Jeff Beck for the first time, after years of trying. And as he’s known for, being the last photographer to shoot Stevie Ray Vaughn.

After paging through the book, I wanted more. More of his old concert shots, more of his more recent work. For photographers, viewing Knight’s work can tell a lot about composition and lighting–what worked, what moment created that visceral feeling you get from a concert photo.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

PJH Studios

Movies, music, books, whiskey, and culture in a blog blender

  • Rock Gods – Forty Years of Rock Photography

    Rock Gods: Forty Years of Rock Photography by Robert M. Knight is a diverse collection of photos that span his entire career. He’s taken pictures of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck and many more. He focuses on lead guitarists, and his body of work shows that, especially with his live concert shots.…

  • Digital Masters by Nancy Brown

    Digital Masters: People Photography: Capturing Lifestyle for Art & Stock (A Lark Photography Book) by Nancy Brown is perfect for the Mom With A Camera crowd, who own a digital SLR and want to get into the portrait business. The tone of the book isn’t overly technical, and what technical aspects are mentioned are basic…

  • Catfish

    Catfisha movie about the Facebook age and tells a story about identity, truth, love, art and perhaps mental illness. It’s shot in a documentary style and works best if you know nothing of the plot. The suspense builds, peaking on a horse farm in Michigan, and then the twist arrives, bringing a cautionary and emotional…

  • A Day in the Future

    As I rise and stretch, I notice I’m sore. Not from tending the fields though. I have no fields. Some unseen person does all the field-tending for me. Sometimes I forget that there’s any field-tending going on at all. Lyrically written.

  • Curation is the new search

    Google has been much maligned of late, due to its increasingly spammy and gamed results. Paul Kedrosky makes a point that curation of web content will be on the rise. The answer, of course, is that we won’t — do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd…

  • Risk Everything

    A user, riskeverything, on Reddit, responded to a thread, entitled “What small decision did you make that altered the entire course of your life?” with the story of his handle.  It spans three continents and involves London’s Big Ben clock tower. I go to London and on first day I went to big ben. I…

  • Dan Wells – Mr. Monster

    The second book of the I Am Not a Serial Killer series, Mr. Monster, begins shortly after the first.  John Wayne Clever still harbors feelings of a sociopath after killing the demon, Mr. Crowley.  John’s life seems to be copacetic for the moment, and improving with the growth of his relationship with Brooke as a…

  • Favorite 2010 albums

    2010 was a great year for music with great releases from many artists and bands and across genres. I didn’t get to listen to everything that the kids at Stereogum, Pitchfork or your local newspaper get to sample, but I managed to pick 6 albums as my favorites. Not necessarily the best, but albums that…

  • Disney, masters of theme park operations

    Disney has theme park logistics down to a nimble operation that monitors all aspects of a park. They use a combination of weather reports, historical records, airline and hotel reservations to predict park capacity, but once the Magic Kindom opens, ride queues, cash registers at in park restaurants, foot traffic in particular areas are all…

  • Joe McNally knows sugar plums

    Ballerinas are all the rage at the moment. Black Swan, New York Times critic Alastair Maccaulay stating that one dancer, Jenifer Ringer, “eaten one sugar plum too many” for a recent production of the Nutcracker. And now Joe McNally, famed photographer, comes to her defense. Joe took portraits of Jenifer with a giant, 40×80 Polaroid…