I’m not gonna grow up to be a concert photographer, but since we went with reserved seats for this show, I figured I’d give it a try. Apologies in advance!
Here’s the stage.

Before the show started, they lowered a rack of lights and…

Oh look at our shitty view! A lot of us at our end of section F (for “fail”) scrambled to find places where we might actually see something besides legs. Thank god they raised the rack a couple songs in; otherwise I would have been really pissy by the end of the show. These were presale tickets! They were supposed to be great seats!
That’s what I get for getting seats, though, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I looked longingly at the people on the floor…

…and decided that despite the road rash and bruises and my inappropriate footwear (canvas slip-on/slip-off sneakers that will surely get lost in the pit if I don’t wrap tape around them to hold them to my feet) I will not hang back by the soundboard tomorrow night in Duluth after all. I want to be smushed up with a bunch of sweaty, screaming, jumping, danging, singing, losing-their-minds people. With seats you just feel so…isolated. I do, at least. If I’m not smushed in with people, I am annoying cognizant of my individualness. I’m a unit. A single, detached entity.
In the crowd, that awareness slips away (usually to the floor, where it gets stomped on and requires a few days recovery afterward).
…um.
So anyway…like I said, after they raised the light rack, we had a good view:

And I was excited to be facing the side of the stage. I’d already seen the full effect of the show on Sunday, so tonight I got the super-cool “behind the scenes” view—just how do they pull off some of their coolest effects? It turns out it’s a three-screen thing, with a normalish screen at the far back and two curved screens (more like metal meshes) that can come down around the band. Here’s how they pull off making it look like there’s a torrential downpour coming down on the band:

Because the front two screens are meshes, wherever “video”—or whatever you’d call it—isn’t projected, you can see right through to whatever’s behind it, like the band, and more rain, and finally the backmost screen, with yet more rain. From a front-on view, it’s amazing.
This is the set for the Ghosts-mix version of “Piggy,” which is fantastic. From the front you see some very cool pulsing effects. When I saw them in Baltimore, I’d had no idea they were layered like this.

Below is a shot from “Only” —layers of white noise. The song opens with “I’m becoming less defined, as days go by, fading away, and well you could say I’m losing focus…,” and the white noise works for it very well.

Also, the screen is heat-sensing, so Trent is able to clear away white noise with his body movements. Very cool. (Earlier in the show, at the end of “The Greater Good,” a stage hand came out with a stage light and “washed” the mess on the screen off by shining it up and down the screen like it was a big paint brush. Sorry—no pics of that.)
Below is the effect for the chorus of “Only.” When you’re looking at this straight-on, you more or less just see Trent singing and static along the bottom. The band is there on the stage, but the lighting—when you’re viewing this from the front—makes the band more or less disappear into the shadows. This is while Trent is singing, “There is no you, there is only me. There is no you, there is only me.”

I tried to get a picture of Josh setting the drum sequencer at the beginning of “Echoplex,” but it was just a white blob…so you’re stuck with my crappy description (and I’m working from memory, so if I get a detail wrong…whatever. I hit my head earlier today.). There’s a screen with three rows of white-outlined boxes (with a line snaking through, but that’s not important—looks cool, but not important). When Josh puts his hand out toward a box, it turns solid red—and it adds a beat to the drum sequence, so he’s essentially programming the drum sequencer via this giant screen on stage. It’s kind of like that piano Tom Hanks played with his feet in Big (if you saw Big when it first came out, not after you could buy those pianos and no one thought you were cool if you did) only…cooler. ‘Cause it’s NIN, and not Tom Hanks.
Anyway. One more shot, from “In This Twilight”:

As this song ends, each band member, one by one, is spotlighted. He stops playing, raises a hand in farewell, and leaves the stage. It’s brilliant. Really a powerful way to end the show.
I’m stoked that the setlists this tour are so heavily focused on the latest three albums: four songs from Ghosts, six from The Slip and seven from Year Zero. Seventeen songs altogether from material released over just the last year and a half. And omg it’s fantastic! I love my NIN CDs, but they don’t compare to how they do these things live.
Tomorrow…. Georgia!