Every inch of the floor is gone and no wall is left untouched by a single body. Like a big animal in a small cage, the tightly packed crowd begins to go insane. Mosh pits form as crowd surfers make their way to the front of the stage hoping to get a glimpse of the lead singer in the San Franciscan venue that seemed non-existent in the daylight. In the thick of the mass, she stands still for a few seconds contemplating whether or not to move forward to get the shot at her target.
Countless tiny square screens that light up the dark and smoky room are everywhere, but the bigger screens with enormous bulky lenses attached are near the front of the stage, where she desires to be. With her petite 5’2 frame, she fights her way up to the orchestral pit to be able to get a good, close look at him front and center. Although flash is not allowed, if she can get close enough, she’ll get what she needs. Her favorite band at the moment, We Are Scientists, plays tonight and she can’t miss the show or the shot that just may make her artwork famous.
Amber Gregory aims to capture unique on-stage moments of artists unintentionally revealing themselves and their emotions in her concert photography. She has worked hard this past year to get her photography career off the ground in her South Beach, San Francisco home by signing up for numerous popular social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.
“At age 27, I finally realized what it meant to control your destiny and through that I began networking with people and putting the word out that I wanted to do concert photography which led to me getting a gig with a music blog,” she says. “I finally understood what people had told me for years. Things don’t just happen to me, I make them happen.”
After only three to four months of networking online, Gregory applied for a position shooting and writing concert reviews for location-specific lifestyle site, Examiner.com, and got the job making nearly $40 a month. The job wasn’t so much for the money as it was for the learning experience, she says.
Her work at UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department as an administrative assistant is what pays the bills for now, but Gregory refuses to let this job become a career. After all, she only applied out of desperate need for life insurance due to her former insurance running out just before marrying her husband, Scott. With her husband running his own marketing service out of their loft apartment, it was crucial she kept her job at UC Berkeley because he is unable to easily obtain life insurance.
“That job is the one thing that prevents me from being happy,” she says. “It doesn’t allow me to be myself…I have to be Sally Straightlace,” she says.
Gregory was even specifically told to dress more appropriately before she was hired. She is the only one in her office to wear bright colors or listen to blaring music and thus dubs herself the office oddball, but making compromises and taking risks is not something new to her.
After finishing high school and turning eighteen, she left the harsh streets city streets of Los Angeles for a different way of life in San Francisco. She moved into a warehouse with several mentally unstable teenagers she met on an online message board.
“Yeah, that's gonna turn out well, can't you just tell?” she says. “I was unaware of what reality was back then…It was an easy way out.”
A year after living a life of frequent raves and drama-filled days, Gregory decided to live with her recently-divorced mother after having a falling out with her boyfriend due to each of them having lost a parent.
“After my dad died, things with my boyfriend were not very good,” she says. “He also had lost his mom tragically very young and I think he was not emotionally able to handle someone else's parent's death plus I was a huge mess,” she says.
Moving in with her mother made her see that she wanted to be out on her own again so Gregory moved back to San Francisco to be with her now-husband. That’s when she began to troll the Internet to network and found a fellow friend who liked her favorite band and was a photographer.
Once she saw what she could create with a camera lens eleven years ago, she fell in love with the job that lacked oversight from her boss and enabled her creative juices to freely flow.
“I've been working really hard on photography because I don’t want to be (an administrative assistant) forever,” she says.
Gregory aspires to become solely dependent on her art work one day. Her plan is to start shooting weddings as her main source of income, but make concert photography her main art.
“I've been working really hard at (the Examiner) and trying to plot my next move,” she says. “Coachella is a huge accomplishment for me and I just got another position with Examiner.com that I’ll be…writing articles about We Are Scientists! Hello, dream assignment!"
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