Jena Hovey’s first exposure to photography came when her mom gave her a disposable camera.
“I would go out and take my dog out,” Hovey explained. “We lived on a farm, so I’d take him out and pose him in front of corn fields and just everything. I already kind of knew composition then. I think it was just an innate thing.”
After graduating from photography school, Hovey started her own business, McShane Photography, in 2011. She cut her teeth on jobs like weddings, shooting up to 25 a year.
Today, her work includes portraiture, landscape art and a growing list of projects shooting live music performances. You now can find Hovey’s photographs at the online music website Loud Hailer, which has about 30 photographers around the country.
Hovey gets to choose her assignments. Along with shows at Lansing’s new music venue Grewal Hall, she’s taken pictures in Grand Rapids, Metro Detroit and even San Diego. She’s photographed acts like Tool, the Dropkick Murphys, Peter Gabriel and the Flaming Lips.
That Flaming Lips show produced her favorite shot so far, an action photo of frontman Wayne Coyne. It was taken at the Royal Oak Music Theatre.
“He puts himself in this big bubble and then walks across the audience,” she explained. “I got that shot where he starts to go, and he kicks the side of it to, you know, start rolling, and I got that action shot and it was just very exciting.”
That might be her favorite shot, but a couple of other assignments stand out for Hovey, especially taking pictures at a Rush concert in 2012.
She described photographing her favorite band as an “I can die happy kind of moment!"
Another favorite, Alice Cooper, was her first press pass.
Hovey also has a passion for photographing big storms, including tornados. As a kid, she and her dad would watch storms roll in over their southern Missouri dairy farm. Since first venturing into “tornado alley” in 2012, she’s kept doing it ever since.
Hovey compares the thrill of being in the photographer’s pit at a rock concert to the rush of storm chasing. She calls such events “heart explosions”. “That’s exactly what I feel every single time I’m in that pit,” Hovey concluded. “That’s like exactly every time I see a tornado or a really cool thunder cloud. It’s the same feeling, being right there in front of that band.”
