She and the three friends she was with each took a piece of her camera and hid the pieces inside a pants leg or elsewhere on their person. They were smuggling Stephanie E. Jennings' Canon into Pittsburgh's Civic Arena for a concert by The Grateful Dead, so she could photograph the famed San Francisco improvisational rock band. The date was June 26, 1988.

Jennings, then a University of Alabama student, had shot plenty of bands in Tuscaloosa, including college radio stars R.E.M. This was her first time shooting The Grateful Dead though. And her first time seeing them in concert. She had started listening to The Dead's music because the guy who lived next door to her in Tuscaloosa was into them "and I was totally into him, so I sent away for tickets and invited him to the show," she recalls now. Coming up on 30 years since her first Dead show, on a recent muggy afternoon Jennings is seated on a comfy chair in her South Huntsville home. Her fluffy cat Sampson, named for the Dead song "Sampson & Delilah," is chilling on an adjacent end table.

That summer day in Pittsburgh, Jennings came away with a few keeper photos of the band, including singer/guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. But outside the arena, she got a ton of shots of the band's Deadhead fans and the hippie-party parking lot scene. "What I loved about the show was that I felt totally comfortable and at home," Jennings says. "I'd been to hundreds of concerts you know but I never felt so at ease getting up and dancing and enjoying myself. It was just like everybody was one. And that was it."

Jennings would go on to attend and photograph around 150 Grateful Dead concerts, she estimates now.

After graduating from Alabama in 1989, she moved to Philadelphia to manage a photography company. The Dead were scheduled to come back to Pittsburgh soon. But at another of the band's shows she'd attended after that first one, security had made Jennings take her camera back to her car, even though tickets for that concert indicated cameras and recording equipment were allowed inside, she says. (The Grateful Dead allowed fans to record the band's live performances, sparking a "tape trading" scene among Deadheads hardcore and casual.)

Frustrated by getting rebuked by security, Jennings wrote a letter to a mailing address she found for the Grateful Dead, asking how she could get her camera into the show. "And I got a call one night," Jennings says, and it was like, 'Hi. I'm Dennis McNally, I'm the publicist for the Grateful Dead. What can I do for you? Well I'll have a photo pass for you at the gate.' I had no idea what a photo pass was."

When it came time for The Dead's next Pittsburgh concert, Jennings drove over from Philly, recruiting a friend from elementary school she hadn't seen in years to go with her. They arrived at the venue, but there was no photo pass for Jennings, causing them to miss opening act Crosby, Stills & Nash. Eventually security went and found McNally for her. He'd simply forgotten about her photo pass and welcomed Jennings and her friend to come inside the venue, showed Jennings where to shoot The Dead from up front for three songs. Since Jennings still didn't have a photo pass, she didn't want to leave the backstage area because she didn't think she'd be able to get back in. At some point a man came over, introduced himself as Cameron Sears, the Grateful Dead's tour manager, and asked what she was doing backstage. Jennings told him. Then, Sears invited her to come take photos at The Dead's show at Washington's RFK Memorial Stadium.

She went to RFK, shooting some 500 photos of the band with her Canon camera - and remember, this was in the era of film and manual focus. "I got to sit on the stage," Jennings says. "And there's Brent (Mydland, keyboardist) and Jerry and it was raining and the stadium was full. It was pretty amazing and very surreal. How is this happening?"

Jennings used those RFK/Dead photos to develop the portfolio that got her going in Philadelphia. Soon she was shooting bands for local publications, radio stations, etc. She began shooting for Grateful Dead fanzines like Dupree's Diamond News and Unbroken Chain too.

This was not the first or last time Dead publicist Dennis McNally helped a young photographer.

"I tried to say yes to young people who were not representing the local paper or whatever. I made a point of trying to be good to college kids," McNally says. When reached for this phone interview, McNally's at a hotel in Chicago, where he's in town to do a lecture on "Desolate Angel," his 1979 book about Beats writer Jack Kerouac. McNally's tome "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead" was published in 2002. His 2015 book "Jerry on Jerry" features unpublished Garcia interviews.

The Grateful Dead were not the most photogenic band in the history of rock. McNally recalls taking his sister, a big David Bowie fan, to see a Dead show in 1974 and afterwards her assessment was, "Well, it was OK but they're not very visual, are they?" McNally says, "I was almost yelling at her, 'What do you want? Garcia to play the guitar with his tongue or something?' In that sense, it's very much parallel to jazz. For the photographer, what you're looking for is that certain moment when there's an expression that you can capture. And it's much more subtle than, with all respect, great band, The Rolling Stones where Keith's doing the splits and Mick's running around. But with the Dead what you see is people making music. They're not performing in the common sense."

McNally says The Dead arrived at an epiphany early in their career, during the LSD-enhanced Acid Test parties of the mid-60s. Unlike most bands' concerts, The Grateful Dead themselves wouldn't be the show - their audiences would. "And that will rearrange your molecules a little bit," McNally says with a laugh. "So what the photographers are doing, is trying to capture is lightning in a bottle. And Stephanie was one of the best at it."

Jennings' most famous photo, a black and white image known as "The Flying Jerry," captures that sort of moment: Garcia onstage at Giants Stadium in 1992 with a mischievous grin on his face and his gray hair blowing in the wind, as he plays one of his custom Doug Irwin electric guitars. The photo appeared in American Photo magazine. It's on Jennings' business card. "The Flying Jerry" is also the photo that's made her the most money.

Repped by a New York agency, Jennings shot many other marquee music acts. AC/DC. INXS. The Replacements. David Bowie's band Tin Machine. Rod Stewart. En Vogue. Black Crowes. Sting. John Prine. Stone Temple Pilots. And many more. She also travelled regularly to shoot MTV events, photographing celebs like supermodel Cindy Crawford. Plastic bins in her Huntsville home overflow with colorful laminated photo passes the size of playing cards.

In photographing musicians, Jennings says she looked for an "expression and body movement and something as they're signing, that connection of when I feel things. So when somebody looks at the picture they feel something. And they remember the picture." Her favorite song to hear The Grateful Dead play live was country-rocker "Truckin'" and she says an April 7, 1995 Tampa Stadium show with the Black Crowes opening was the best Dead performance she ever witnessed.

Early in her Philadelphia years, Jennings dated Grateful Dead road manager Cameron Sears, who'd noticed her backstage early on in Pittsburgh. The relationship brought with it increasingly far-out scenes. Now she wasn't just photographing The Grateful Dead, she was going out to dinner with them and flying to shows with the band.

Unfortunately on Aug. 9, 1995, Garcia, overweight and a longtime heroin user, was found dead of a heart attack in his room at a California rehabilitation clinic. The Grateful Dead disbanded. Jennings says she "took a wrong turn after Jerry died." This included becoming involved with notorious "Wall of Sound" record producer Phil Spector, who Jennings had met at New York restaurant Elaine's - she was walking out of the restroom while he was walking in. She told Spector she'd recently photographed him in Philly. He responded by saying he recently almost shot her - like, with his gun. "Then he was like, 'Come join our table,'" Jennings recalls. "A normal person would probably have said, 'No thank you.' But I was like, 'Sure.'"

So what does one do on a date with Phil Spector? Jennings says they used to go to dinner at Elaine's a lot. "Everything would be fun. And then things would get crazy." They attended a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony together, at one point during the event she had two drinks in her hands and Spector's "gun hanging off my wrist" when rock legend Neil Young introduced himself.

In 2007, Jennings testified in Spector's trail for the murder of Lana Clarkson, the struggling actress who was killed by a gunshot to the mouth after going home with Spector from her nightclub job. According to the Los Angeles Times, Jennings testified Spector had threatened Jennings with a gun in 1995 after she refused to join him in his New York hotel suite. There were also hostile, obscenity-laden voice-mails from Spector to Jennings played during the trial. Spector was convicted of Clarkson's murder in 2009.

Jennings describes the trial as "a nightmare."

"I was depressed. I was paranoid. Stress. It made work extremely difficult - photographing the wedding and then the people at the wedding seeing their photographer on Court TV. [Laughs] I'd photograph two or three weddings a weekend (in Philadelphia) and then fly out to the trial for a week and have to fly back to shoot a wedding. And I wasn't financially in the position to be able to do that. Of course, they paid for flying back and forth but I needed to be working. It really took a toll on me financially and mentally."

Jennings had grown up in Huntsville. While at Lee High School a teacher theere named Mr. Esslinger encouraged her photography, a pursuit she'd been interested from an early age, when she used to watch her eccentric grandfather take Polaroid snapshots. She rarely came back to Huntsville as an adult. But after a brief stint in Las Vegas didn't go as well, three years ago or so she returned to her hometown to help take care of her ailing grandmother. It was during this time Jennings got sober and she's grateful her grandmother got to see her turn her life around before she died.

Jennings would like to put together a coffee-table book of her music photography. But she's cautious. Gesturing at stacks of photo notebooks in her home, "A lot of this is unpublished because every time I've trusted somebody to do something with it, it's never turned out good for me." Jennings also is a talented fine arts photographer, influenced by the likes of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, and some of these edgy images hang in her home.

Since coming home, Jennings reconnected with Keating Johns, a University of Alabama friend also at that same 1988 Pittsburgh show she photographed The Dead at for the first time. Johns had first met Jennings out and about in Tuscaloosa during college, where she worked for event photographers Zap. Now a Boeing engineer by trade, Johns also plays guitar and sings in local acoustic band Milltowne. The bluegrass-tinged group's song list includes 30 or so Dead tunes, including "Jack Straw" and "Uncle John's Band." In 2015, some of Jennings' Dead concert photos were projected on the wall during a Milltowne concert celebrating the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary. "When I was singing I could look out and see a picture of Jerry Garcia singing back to me," Johns says. "It was a thrill for me and I think it added a lot for the audience too, to see those images. She's always looking for a different shot or different portrayal of the band and maintained that level of commitment both to the music and her own art through the years."

In a full-circle moment, Jennings works for Zap again, having driven to Tuscaloosa to shoot UA sorority bid day for the last three years. She also photographed Lee High School's graduation. "I never expected when I walked across that stage to be back 30 years later photographing the graduation," Jennings says. "I fully believe right now it's not where I expected to be, but it's where I needed to be." Hints of Jennings' previous touring life sometimes arise in everyday moments. When her mobile phone rings, the classic Grateful Dead track "Sugar Magnolia" plays as the ringtone.

More: facebook.com/StephanieJenningsPhotography