Do you feel like I do, right here right now? Live-blogging from the stage.

I am setting up a system to do live-blogging from the concerts I go to.

When shooting a concert on a photo or press pass, you are generally allowed to use your pro (DSLR) camera for a strictly defined time period. This is usually the first three songs; sometimes 4-6 or the last three. Depends on the band. Other than those specifically allowed times, you have to put the camera away and they get very testy if you don’t. Some smaller places let you continue but medium-large venues almost always have this “no pro camera” policy outside of the agreed-upon time frame.

However, they don’t much care about point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones and don’t usually bother telling people to stop unless they’re using flash or otherwise making a pest of themselves. (N.B. Flash is very bad 99.9% of the time, do not use do not want!) I always bring a P&S (Canon G9 or Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18) with me to use after the photo-pass part is done. Haven’t been stopped yet. But, there is no immediacy with those. They take beautiful pictures but the time required to go home, get the images off the card, process even a tiny bit, watermark, and upload, takes forever in today’s ADD society. People want to see NOW. I don’t mind doing it but the ability to post in-the-moment is very interesting to me, both for the ability in itself and to see what others are doing. Back in March I posted several times from the front row of The Pogues and I can’t tell you how many hits I got from those brief descriptions of what was happening right at that second.

I kind of vaguely knew that it was possible to take pictures with a cell phone and have them sent to a blog right away but didn’t really look into it until I was reading over at Nine Inch Nails. They have got this process down to an exact science. NIN is probably the most technologically savvy and computer-literate band in existence today: I bet they’d not even hire a part-time coffee lady who didn’t know how to use a Mac inside and out. Most or all of the band members and tour staff have an iPhone and email addresses set up so they can take pictures at a moment’s notice and have them upload immediately to the tour’s photoblog. It’s really fascinating to see these pictures as they happen vs. what happened at the concert 4 hours ago or 2 days ago even. Someone will post a picture of them entering the stage and within 30 seconds it’s up and being viewed by people as the concert progresses, who are waiting until the next live picture appears.

Well anyway, after seeing some of the pictures posted there it gave me a right kick in the ass to figure this out. Possibly will have it working for tonight at Sigur Rós. The posts would not show up here though, until I figure *that* out, or if that’s even possible; they’ll go to a separate Blogger account. There’s probably a WordPress widget somewhere that would feed the Blogger posts here but I have no time to find it right now.

And they’re cell phone pictures from my BlackBerry, so don’t be expecting quite the usual style that I get from my Nikon. There’s a tradeoff in quality for speed. Nothing’s perfect … until Nikon or Canon figure out a way to send pics direct from the camera via satellite link. Hmmm, something new for them to work on now that they’ve got video integrated in a DSLR??

Will update here with the Blogger URL when it’s set up. Check back!