Photos from the Live near WWDC 2025 Breakpoints concert

For the past many years, I’ve had the pleasure of photographing James Dempsey and the Breakpoints during their Live near WWDC performance the week of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. This year marked the first time in several years that the band played at the same venue: The Art Boutiki in San Jose.

Streaming the concert

In addition to taking photos during the show, I was once again responsible for the livestream on YouTube. With the help of Chris and the team at The Art Boutiki, we used my application, MixEffect, to control the ATEM Mini Extreme and Nikon and Sony full-frame cameras.

We used HDMI cables for the two back-of-house cameras, which was fine because they were only 6 to 10 feet away from the ATEM. To avoid running HDMI and SDI wires from the stage camera to the back of house (like we did last year), we used Chris’ Hollyland Pyro 4K wireless transmitter and receiver. The performance of the Hollyland was solid, and it’s something I might consider buying in the future.

To get the audio from the soundboard in sync with the video going into the ATEM, we introduced a 150ms audio delay. Getting perfect audio sync is always a challenge, especially when you’re mixing different cameras and technologies to feed video into the switcher.

Photos

I’m still using my Canon 5D Mark IV for still photography. For this show, I used the EF 28–70mm f/2.8 and the EF 70–200mm f/2.8L IS lenses. The lighting at the venue was fairly consistent, and I was shooting at ISO 3200, f/2.8, and between 1/125s and 1/200s. With a more modern setup like an EOS R, I’d get better low-light performance and faster autofocus with the same lenses. That said, I have no burning desire to get a new camera right now—but that day will come eventually.

Here is a sampling of photos from the event. Click here for the full gallery over on SmugMug.

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