Here is an article PDN Online did with Jessica Earnshaw about her time documenting the Skipping Stone Tour. If anyone saw that tour you usually saw Jessica moving out and about with her camera 
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When photographer Jessica Earnshaw made a handshake deal with musician Alexz Johnson to document the singer/songwriter’s Skipping Stone Tour last year, one of her motivations was adventure. “I’d never gone on tour before,” she says. But her other motivation was to expand beyond her niche documenting families and kids for health and social service clients.
“Music is a huge influence on kids, and I was trying to break into music photography, but it was really hard when I was showing work that had nothing to do with that,” Earnshaw says. “I had to have something to show people.”
Johnson’s 18-show tour offered Earnshaw an opportunity to build a music portfolio. Close friends for a decade, Earnshaw and Johnson had worked together on a TV show in Toronto before relocating to New York City independently to establish careers in the U.S.
Earnshaw didn’t get a fee to cover the tour, but all of her expenses were covered. (Johnson raised $70,000 on Kickstarter to fund the tour.) Earnshaw anticipated low-lighting conditions at the concerts, but wanted to avoid using flash in order to better capture the atmosphere of the venues. That would require fast lenses, and Earnshaw already had several prime lenses—35mm, 50mm and 85 mm—that she ended up using, plus a 17-40mm lens “for when I had more light because it wasn’t fast.” She bought a Canon EOS 5D Mark III body for its low-light and video capabilities. To capture sound, she used the built-in microphones of both her camera and a Zoom H4N digital recorder, which she set up near the band’s soundboard at every concert.
The first show was on June 25, 2012, in New York City, then the tour began in earnest a month later with a show in Toronto, followed by 16 other shows over the next month in cities across the U.S. Earnshaw quickly realized, “I was more interested in the story than the one-off concert shots,” she says. “I loved the back-end of it, the dream [and] expectation in touring, the quiet moments, the pressure, the craziness, the fans who paid to see her.”
Earnshaw spent long days shooting behind the scenes, then shooting the concerts. While traveling between shows in the band’s Wi-Fi-equipped van, she edited her take and posted selected images and video clips on Johnson’s blog.
“I had such a great response from the tour blog. Her fans were coming up to me to say how much they loved it,” Earnshaw says.
Back in New York City, Earnshaw spent several weeks editing her video footage into a 25-minute documentary of the tour for Johnson’s website. Earnshaw also decided at the end of the tour that she had the audience, a narrative story (as opposed to just a collection of concert photos) and the creative inspiration to self-publish a limited-edition book.
“I’d seen a book on Patti Smith, and the work Annie Leibovitz photographed for Rolling Stone. I loved those behind-the-scenes photographs,” Earnshaw says. “I thought it would be cool to have a rock ’n’ roll tour book at the end.”
She asked photographer Sylvia Plachy for help editing and sequencing for the book. “Sylvia I know through a workshop she taught at the International Center of Photography and we got along great,” Earnshaw says.
“She had previously edited some other work I had done and I loved the way she edited.” (In exchange for her help, Earnshaw is now helping Plachy build a website.)
Earnshaw considered a Web-based print-on-demand service for printing her book. “I wasn’t hearing great things [from other photographers], and it was expensive” for a print run of 100, she says. On a recommendation from her lab in New York City, she ended up contracting with El Sereno Graphics in Los Angeles for the printing. The cost was $26.25 per copy, plus $600 she paid a designer to help lay out the book.
Earnshaw presold the books to ensure that she didn’t lose money on them. Johnson helped her by promoting the book to all the fans who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that funded the tour. Books signed by Johnson were priced at $75. Unsigned books were $50. Earnshaw earned about $2,400 on the book sales after expenses.
It was a modest profit, considering all the work Earnshaw put into it. The real payoff has been the exposure of the project through various channels, and the foothold that it has given Earnshaw in the music photography business.
Besides the exposure on Johnson’s blog, Earnshaw’s images went out to Johnson’s 100,000 Facebook followers and 43,000 Twitter followers. Johnson distributed the images as publicity photos for various magazines. Mashable and Resource Magazine both ran stories featuring photo galleries with Earnshaw’s images from the tour.
Earnshaw has also landed assignments as a result of her Skipping Stone Tour work. Island Def Jam hired her to cover the label’s acts at the South By Southwest Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas, last spring. Ebony magazine hired her to shoot pictures for a series about fathers and sons, while Newsday hired her to shoot One Direction fans outside the Jones Beach Theater on New York’s Long Island.
“Before and after Alexz’s tour I had very different ideas of where I wanted to go with music and why I was reaching out to editors. Now it’s to develop relationships with them in order to pitch stories,” she says.
Most recently, Earnshaw directed, shot and edited Johnson’s “Nothin’ On Me” music video, which was featured on the MTV Buzzworthy blog. It was another self-promotion coup for Earnshaw, who credits her success with the video to all she learned about photographing and filming music performances during the Skipping Stone Tour.