The best photos come about when you bring together the audience and the artist. Unfortunately, this only happens sporadically. The best option to do this is to shoot from the stage, but that is not always allowed. Plus, one disadvantage is that you end up shooting the backside of the artist. That's why I would rather shoot from an audience perspective instead of from the stage.
If there's a catwalk, the artist can walk forward into the audience. In that case, all you have to do is wait patiently for this to happen and for the hands to go up in the air. If there is no catwalk, wait until the artist moves to the front of the stage and bends forward towards the audience. This only works when there is no photo pit or other space between the stage and the audience. You will have to get into the crowd to make a picture like this, but it's definitely worth it.
In these two photos, you can see the catwalk connected to the main stage. One option is to stand alongside the catwalk to capture audience and artist together. However, you can get a better effect if you stand in the audience and use a long telephoto lens so you can't see the stage at all. Artist and audience are one.
Here, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit is standing on a barrier in the photo pit and leaning forward over the heads of the audience. While the other photographers stormed down there with their wide-angle lenses, I ran the other way, climbed onto the barrier, and made this shot from an audience perspective with a 300 mm lens. I got this shot easily, as my colleagues were on the other side where they were held back from Fred Durst by the security guards.
