Jamiroquai is my favorite pop band of all time. I’ve been following them since the mid-90s, when I first saw them live in New York City, and I’ve caught them every chance I’ve gotten since, including once in San Francisco. This summer I was six weeks into a trip through Europe, and Luxembourg wasn’t a stop I stumbled into — I built it into the route specifically to catch them. The plan was simple: get there early, get up against the rail, and rock out. That alone, on the other side of the world, would have been more than enough. (They were on the Jamiroquai Heels of Steel Tour, playing a venue called Luxepro The Box.) Jamiroquai doesn’t play the U.S. often, and there’s a rule I’ve held onto for years without ever quite explaining it, even to myself: I won’t trade seeing them for photographing them. So when the chance to photograph this show for them actually came up, I had to stop and think about it. I don’t think I’d ever said out loud, to anyone, that I’d dreamed of photographing this band one day. But how could I possibly say no to an opportunity like that?
Scrambling for Gear
I found out about this the day before, while I was literally still at Heathrow airport. My first thought wasn’t excitement — it was panic about my gear. I was traveling for vacation, not a job, so I didn’t have the lenses I would have wanted for a stage this size. I started searching for camera rental houses in Luxembourg and even checked whether Nikon Professional Services had a presence there, which I knew was a long shot. Neither panned out. So I went with what I had: one body and three lenses, nothing longer than my 85mm f/1.8. My Wimbledon tote bag doubled as a makeshift lens bag for the night, which apparently didn’t read as “photographer” to anyone — I got asked twice who I was with, artist pass on my wrist the entire time. Still makes me laugh.
The Portraits I Almost Didn’t Get
I ended up spending a few hours backstage with the band that afternoon — not a quick hello and a photo, just genuinely hanging out. Earlier that day, on a hunch, I’d packed a small inflatable light — a Chillbeam — just in case there was a quiet window before the show and I felt comfortable enough to ask about doing a few quick backstage portraits. I wasn’t sure it would happen. But once I felt good about it, I mentioned it casually, and they were into it.
The backstage area itself wasn’t much to look at, so I found a plain black wall, put everyone in front of it one at a time, and kept it simple — enough to give it a bit of a studio feel in the middle of what was otherwise just a green room. I had maybe 60 seconds with each person, just enough time to play with a couple of poses and get something real. Everyone was easy and gracious about it, even with almost no notice and even less setup.
I didn’t get every member of the band that night, and that’s the one thing I’d change if I could. I didn’t know everyone at the time! But I’ve learned to hold onto “next time” rather than dwell on what I missed — and saying it out loud usually means there’s a next time coming.
Photographing From the Pit
The show itself was challenging. The stage was high, and I didn’t have anything with real reach, so I had to figure out fast what lens and position combination would actually work best. I stayed in the photo pit for the first two songs, alongside the general press photographers. I found a spot along the stage without a monitor wedge blocking my view and stayed there, camera held above my head most of the time. If you’ve shot like this before, you know it’s not the most fun — you’re relying almost entirely on the camera’s focus system without being able to see or override it, since the screen is pointed away from you and above your line of sight. You take a lot of frames. My workhorse for this was the 85mm 1.8, though I got a few good ones on the 24-70 when Jay walked over to my side of the stage. Shoutout to my Nikon Z6iii for kicking butt too! I love that camera!
On Stage
After the pit, I went up on stage. That was scary and unbelievable to me. They let me move around the sides and even behind Derrick at the drum kit. I leaned on the 85mm again up there, working for shallow depth of field shots of Jay from the back of the stage with the crowd visible behind him — the kind of shot that only exists because of the trust and access you’re given (something I recognized being so rare and such great timing for me). I also had my 14-30mm f/4 with me, along with the pole extension that comes with Insta360 cameras. I rigged a small ballhead onto the end of it, mounted my camera on it, and used it to raise the rig high overhead for wide shots of the band and the crowd together. The technique is old-school: bring the camera to your face, pre-focus on something, lock it into manual focus, set a short timer, flip the screen down, and raise the whole rig straight up above your head, letting it fire off a few frames before bringing it back down. It’s a technique I’ve been leaning on lately for wide shots that just don’t look the same from eye level.
I returned to the pit, which by then was empty — a strange, quiet kind of full-circle moment. At this point I became very much aware that lasers were facing out toward the audience from the stage. Lasers destroy camera sensors so I stayed cognizant of where those were at all times! But I was able to dance in there a little bit 🙂 My lovely friend Isabel was out in the crowd and caught some photos and video of me working, which was its own surreal thing to see afterward. I finished by moving as far back in the venue as I could and grabbing more wide shots of the stage and crowd, using the same raised-camera technique, before wrapping coverage for the night.
Meeting Jay
I stayed for at least another hour after the show ended, talking with Rob, Paul, and Derrick while Jay finished his post-show routine nearby. When I finally got to talk to Jay, telling him I was American and had seen the band play in the States six times over the years, was something else entirely. We got to talk through all of it — the New York shows dating back to the mid-90s, including the one the night before 9/11, and the one I caught years later in San Francisco. I told him, straight up, that they needed to come back and play the States again. I think he heard me! He actually invited me to come photograph them again two days later in Stuttgart. As much as I wanted to say yes, the rest of my trip was already in motion, North Sea Jazz waiting on the other end, and Stuttgart just wasn’t a stop I could add without unraveling everything after it.
What I Keep Coming Back To
I turned 50 this year, and if there’s one thing I keep relearning at this age, it’s that the best things tend to show up unscripted, when you’re not angling for them. This whole night is proof of that. I never reached out to the band — no “hey, do you know anyone I can hit up?” no weeks spent trying to make this happen. A friend of mine is friends with one of the guys in the band, and out of nothing but kindness, reached out to see if there was a way we could link up after the show since I already had tickets. That’s it. Everything that followed — the artist pass, the backstage access, the stage — came down to a wonderful friend making an introduction, and that introduction being received with love and trust before we’d even met.
What struck me once I was there was how much trust they extended to someone they’d never met. Usually access like that is limited and closely supervised, and that makes total sense — trust is normally something you build over time. But they gave me an enormous amount of freedom from the start, and I kept reminding myself the whole night that I hadn’t asked for any of this. It just fell in my lap. I was in a dream moment. I promise it wasn’t lost on me.
You put in the work, you try to be good to people along the way, and every now and then, this is what comes back. I don’t say that to sound like I’ve figured something out — I just know that a trip I booked to stand in the front row at a concert 5,500 miles from home turned into one of the more meaningful nights of my life, and none of it was something I could have planned for.
Nights like this are still the whole point.
You can always see more of my concert work here!
