Photographing Rock N Roll's Biggest Stars - 36 Years Of Shooting Austin City Limits

Ray Charles; Photo by Scott Newton

Austin, Texas based photographer, Scott Newton, has many aspiring music photographers dream gig. For the past 36 years, Newton has been the photographer for Austin City Limits (ACL), a well known music series that hosts popular musicians for special one-off live TV performances. As ACL photographer, Newton has put together an expansive portrait collection of stars such as Ray Charles, The Rolling Stones, Robert Plant, Coldplay , Dave Matthews Band, and more.

Back in 1979, the first year of Newton shot for ACL, he was limited to shooting only two rolls of black and white film per show. Those earlier images were used for promotional shots in newspapers, so “You couldn’t get too fancy,” Newton told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. Newton now revels in artistic freedom and digital photography, taking upwards of 2000 photos per show for ACL’s website.

Newton was recently tasked with curating down his collection to 99 images for an ongoing display at ACL Live. Join him as he walks us through the exhibition and details the moments in which he captured some of his most remarkable images.

“Any photo that any photographer takes is a self portrait on some level. You know, it’s what he chooses to see, it’s what he chooses to show you…So any time you look at any piece of art, really, the artist is in there. The self portrait of the artist is there.”

[ Scott Newton via Reddit | Wall Street Journal ]

Matthieu

What´s the point in taking 2000 shots of a show ? That´s roughly 1 shot every 4 seconds. No doubt this guy is talented, but I guess his work was overall better when he was shooting only 2 rolls per show (and I’m 100% digital, I never shot rolls)…
- Glenn
  
  Back stage / all access pass is the point of 2k images…
Rick

It is interesting to look at the photos in the link above and to note just how much better the black and white ones are. And it’s not because they are B&W, it’s because the two roll limitation forced him to think very seriously about every shot he took rather than blowing through a thousand images and then picking out a few good ones.

Funny how that works, isn’t it.
Ralph Hightower

I love his comment when he photographed Ray and he knew he nailed it. I was shooting a concert and my wife heard the click and motor drive advance, she said “You nailed it!” With film, we don’t get the chance to review our images in camera.