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Tunnel Vision


Sometimes as a visual artist there's a natural tendency to get locked into a subject.  It often happens when you're completely sold-out to an image that your eyes and your camera both agree on.  This happened to me for the first time in a musical setting back in 2011.  I was invited back to my hometown of High Point, North Carolina as one of a small number of freelance-photographers for the inaugural John Coltrane International Jazz Festival.  

As always I was excited to return home to see my family and friends, and as usual it was a pretty memorable trip home.  The temperature the day of the festival was nothing shy of 98-100 degrees.  Call time was around 1 pm during the peak of the heat of day.  I'm pretty sure I drank forty dollars worth of crushed ice snow balls before days end.  Fast forward to later that evening and we're several minutes away from the closing act.  By this time I'd worn out my welcome with security by pushing the boundaries of capturing moments from angles that other photographers seemed to not have noticed.  One security guard even said to me, "man if you weren't working so hard I would have thrown you out four hours ago".  His comment was pretty timely being that we only had thirty minutes left in the show.  

It was an intense remaining thirty minutes as I was beginning to cramp from being beat down by the hot Carolina sun for eight hours.  Pain or no pain none of that mattered because there was a legend about to take the stage.  In the world of Jazz singers there are few people that receive honorable mention like the woman below.  This is largely due to the intimacy of the group that qualifies those that deserve honorable mention.

Fortunately for me and the remaining photographers Patti Austin was legendary voice that was about to grace us.  You could see in everyone's eyes that they only had a few shots left in them.  I thought to myself, " J you've got seven shots left".  Those seven shots required a high level of focus and strategy because my fatigue level was at its' highest and security was watching me like a hawk.  Needless to say that I got my seven shots but there's just one that tells the story from her performance.  The one below.  See even though I was operating as a photographer that night, my roots run deep into my television experience. 

My goal was for people to see this image and the angles in which both audiences were absorbing the show.  The photo shows the complete frame of the night.  I wanted people to see it and remember ever image that showed up on the jumbo screens.  My first Tunnel Vision experience... 



Photo: By J.J. McQueen
Artist Patti Austin 



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