I have been waiting for this since I was 15 years old! When my parents bought me a stereo for my 15th birthday many years ago the first record (yes... vinyl that is!) was Accept - Balls to the Wall. That summer I had a job as a lifeguard at a pool in an apartment complex in Mahwah, NJ. To say that there was a lot of down time during that summer would be an understatement. I think I had two tapes (yes... cassettes!) that I listened to that entire summer. Those were... Michael Schenker - Built to Destroy, and Accept - Balls to the Wall. I memorized every not of every song on those two albums! That was also the summer that I saved up enough money to buy myself a Carvin half stack for my guitar, about a thousand bucks if I remember correctly.

Since that summer I can say that two of my biggest guitar influences have been Michael Schenker and Wolf Hoffmann. Maybe there was something great about German guitarists that summer... I don’t know. :-) To this day I can hear both of these people in my own playing style.

Now, if you remember, I got to meet Wolf Hoffmann this past January in Nashville. He’s a photographer there and I met him at the Imaging USA show. We had a great time sharing a few pints in an Irish pub one night. You couldn’t meet a nicer person. In my mind I was constantly thinking back to that summer that I memorized every note of every guitar solo that he played on that album... and now we’re having a beer together. What a trip that was...

So, I called Wolf when I saw the date for the NYC show which was the first show of Accept’s new tour. They have a new singer named Mark Tornillo and a new CD (I almost typed album) coming out soon. So, instead of being a full time photographer right now, Wolf gets to be a full time rock star again! He set me up with a photo pass for the show with no “three song rule”. I really did my best to not only capture the show but to also stand back and take it all in. So many times I find myself so intent on the images that I forget to realize what’s really going on. So, I got to do both.

Well, enough typing, let’s see some images. These were all shot with a Nikon D3 with a 24-70mm lens and a Nikon D3s with a 70-200mm lens.