PORTFOLIO: Final Shots.

I took a step back from the rest of the world this evening and simply went through my live music shots, looking for those final ten that could make up my portfolio. 

It was a difficult process, because I'm so picky about my own work and there are very few shots that I truly consider great. I decided to make it simple on myself and pick out a few that I personally liked for one reason or another. I didn't consider orientation; I didn't consider quality. Because when it comes to live music, sometimes quality isn't key - it's all about getting the shot. 

Originally I wanted my portfolio to consist of five live shots and five musician's portraits, but I cut the portrait section of it because I didn't have enough that I was happy with. So I was just looking at live shots tonight. 

I tried to keep the black and white vs. colour battle even. In the end, I ended up with twelve shots that I'm considering - six colour, six black and white. 

The Final Countdown

I like this shot for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I think the rim-light is beautiful. Second, because I love that green light. Third, I love the girl's expression. You can tell that she is completely into the music and her playing. 

On the flip side, I don't know if this shot would be appropriate - taken out of context, it's not all that easy to see that she is a musician. 

I prefer this shot in 2:3, but I decided my portfolio was going to be 8x10, so I needed to crop it. Much like with the first shot, I love this because of the colours and the pose of the musician - he is completely focused on his music. 

I do not like the microphone stand in the left of the frame, but removing it isn't exactly easy - and in some ways, it feels wrong. 

Honestly, there's not much that I don't like about this shot - and I've shown it to the class before and they all seemed to love it, too. It is fairly timeless. You can't tell what genre the drummer is playing (seriously, I dare you to try!) and I will never get over the ghosting of the stick. It is something that I always aim to achieve in drummer shots. 

I am concerned with the way that this will print at the moment, but this shot is in for sure. 

This was probably the worst show I ever photographed, and it was hard for me at the time to find shots that I liked. But looking back, here is one I am semi-happy with. I like the simple pose of the singer and the fact that the microphone isn't covering up his face. 

I do not like the low quality feel of the shot. It is very noisy. 

Originally I had this one in colour, but I felt like the colour wasn't really adding anything. It looked better, more appealing, in black and white. This is a shot that I have always been happy with. It doesn't matter that it doesn't have the greatest composition and it's not entirely sharp - what matters is that I timed it perfectly, and got a shot that no other photographer at this show managed to get. 

I am fairly certain that I want to use this shot. 

I like the posing in this shot. To me, it is a classic guitarist shot - foot up on the amp, looking out at the crowd, playing something magical. When I showed this one to the class, I got some positive feedback. But mostly they just wanted to know what the tattoo on his neck was. (It's an owl, by the way.) 

I'm concerned that this shot might come out a little dark, and that it's very soft. 

I like this shot because it is simple but expressive. For people who don't know the band, it's just a rock musician doing what rock musicians do - giving the middle finger to the world. For people who are fans of the band, this photo can relate to a song whose lyrical chant declares, "Middle fingers up if you don't give a fuck." 

I am concerned this shot might not be appropriate? (Why do I feel like I'm still in high school? If we can handle artistic nudes, surely we can handle such "vile" hand gestures.) 

I like this shot because of the stick ghosting. That's basically it. I don't like the low quality feel of the shot and the fact that it's so noisy. 

I will most likely cut this shot. 

This was a good show for me. It was my first time shooting a venue with fantastic lighting and therefore the first time that I got live shots that were actually sharp! And that is why I'm so thrilled with this image. That, and the fact that the singer is so obviously into the song. 

I don't like that the microphone is covering half of his face. 

This guy is in the same band as the guy in the previous shot, so - same show, same great lighting, same awesome results. I like this shot because it's simple and expressive. I also really love it in colour, even with the tiny flare in the corner, because everything is warm and complimentary. 

I am fairly certain I will be using this shot. 

Same show as the last two, different band. I love the expression on this guy's face and the lighting in the background is gorgeous. My only complaint is that it's maybe a little busy. 

I am trying to decide between this shot and the next one. 

I like this shot because of the lighting, because it's sharp, and because the colour somehow works. I don't really like the fact that there's a microphone and a harmonica covering his face, but I do like that it shows how multi-skilled he is. 

And there we have it. The shots that I am considering. I'm thinking I might do some small prints of each in the next few days and see how they look in paper and ink.

Six Easy Steps: A Photo Essay.

One of the final three assignments we have is to shoot a photo essay while using the fill-flash technique. The photo essay was to demonstrate an how to accomplish an outdoor activity using six easy steps. 

My initial idea, offered by my brother, was to show the use of the family barbeque. But because of the recent fires there is a total fire ban, and therefore the barbeque didn't seem like such a great idea. So I decided on watering the garden instead. 

I'm not sure that I love my current shots, but at least I have something for if I don't get another chance to attempt it in the next week or so.

The Angel Of Vengeance: Coming Together.

I've been working on The Angel Of Vengeance book cover/poster/whatever it is, and I'm liking the way that things are going so far. I took what I have so far to class on Wednesday, to ask Ben whether or not it would be suitable as my assignment, and he said I was on the right track. So that's a good thing. 

In the spirit of being more open with my work, like last time, here's some insight into what I have so far. 

These are the images that I started out with: 

Yes, even the text was a photo! I also used two pictures of the sky (with clouds) as the background for my image, but they're on a different hard drive and therefore not accessible to me at the moment. But every photo is mine, was taken by me, etc. 

Put together, here is what I have complied so far: 

I'm not quite ready to call it done yet, though I don't know what more I might be adding to it.

The Angel Of Vengeance.

Have I mentioned previously that I might have an idea for the third part of my movements assignment, involving creating a poster/cover/something to do with a story that I am writing? Yes? Well, I am going to do it. 

I usually wouldn't post about this until after everything is said and done, because I hate to think of everything failing and me still having all this work up here as if things are going great, but I think it would be a good thing to put my planning here. It might motivate me to get things done, even if the first few attempts fail. So here it is - the first planning stages of my next assignment. 

I decided that I wanted to make a book cover/movie poster type thing for my current work in progress, The Angel Of Vengeance. I'm not going to bother finding perfect models for my characters - because let's face it, nobody's going to know the difference expect me! So this weekend I have my best friend coming over, and I'm probably going to end up using my two brothers as my two main male characters. (There is the potential of a third male character coming into play, and I have a co-worker in mind should this happen.) 

I have a general idea of how I want things to look, so I put my amazing drawing skills to practice and drew a mock-up: 

Gosh, what am I doing photography for?

Obviously, this isn't perfect. But it's an easy way of reminding myself how I plan for things to look. I also searched around on Google and found some images for inspiration, ideas, and for the way that I want things to look. It doesn't cover everything at the moment (because a lot of things are still just in my head, too) but I threw it all together and created a mini mood board: 

I want the image to be more dark than light, and I don't want the background to be distracting - which is why in the background inspiration images up there, we've got brick walls and smoke. 

Here's another thing I wouldn't usually do: give away spoilers, but in the spirit of noting down all of my idea-ing here... 

I want to try to create this image using only photos - as in, not artificially creating anything in Photoshop from scratch. It will be a challenge for me I think, but I'm up for it. Given the nature of the story, it's going to be interesting - so here are some ideas for how I intend to create the...crazier-looking things.

Zoe will potentially have lightning coming from her hands. Unsurprisingly, I've never managed to obtain a great image of lightning. I considered buying a plasma ball and taking shots of that, but then as I was walking to work on Tuesday morning another idea struck me. As I looked up into the trees, I was amazed at how much their branches looked like lightning strikes. And so I intend to use tree branches. 

Paris's hands were a little more difficult at first, but then the idea was obvious when it finally came to me - coloured smoke (or maybe just white, we'll see) and a sun flare or two. Again, we'll see how things go. 

Nathaniel has a force field surrounding him. When I first attempted a practice image on my brother, I followed a tutorial online that showed you how to make a force field. I didn't really like the look of it, but I figured it would do if I needed it. (I didn't save this image, so I sadly can't post it here!) But as I want to create this image now using only photos, I came up with a simple idea: shooting the rim of a glass. 

I also want to shoot a glass with a sparkler inside of it - both because it might create another interesting lightning shot, and because it might make for an interesting force field. 

If the third male character is included, he will be behind all of the others - looking back at the scene over his shoulder. 

This is obviously going to take quite a bit of work, and I don't have all the time in the world, but I have my hopes that it will work. If it does, then I'll tackle the issue of how I'm going to print it.

The Drummer Girl.

Over the weekend my best friend and I got together to conduct a photo shoot. This was where I was going to attempt to shoot her playing the drums, in the style of Arin in the "Hail To The King" video. But things didn't go according to plan, firstly because I changed my mind. 

We started out just with a few of her drums, and I found that no matter what I did, I just couldn't get a decent photo with them in shot. All the photos I ended up liking were only her holding her drumsticks, but I still felt like it fit my own brief - for my portfolio, I'm shooting music. Drumsticks show she's a musician, and that is the main thing. 

Here are the three shots that I ended up liking the most. 

The first I love because it shows her crazy personality. Nothing she did that day was staged - I just let her be herself, and this was one of the things that happened. I love her for it, and it got me a shot that I love.

The second I didn't look at much at first, but I came to love it after a second look. Overall, I think it's just a decent portrait. 

The third is the one that I am leaning towards including in my portfolio. I can't really pin-point why - I just really like it. I think it just works.

MUSIC VIDEO: "Hail To The King" by Avenged Sevenfold.

It is first important to know that Avenged Sevenfold are my favourite band in all the world, so I often find inspiration in them, their artistic endeavors, and their lyrics. They dropped their latest music video for "Hail To The King" a few days ago, and I was less than impressed. I love music videos that have a story to them, or a clear concept that I can follow. This didn't seem to be much at all. All in all, I found it rather boring. 

But I am putting it here, because I loved the lighting that I was seeing. It was harsh; there were strong shadows. There was a shot of Arin (drummer) where (my memory is a little foggy here) either he was in silhouette and the drums were well lit, or vice versa, and I really loved it. As I've been considering basing my end-of-year portfolio on music, I thought that could make for a really amazing shot. 

Complex Subjects.

Today's practical lesson had us looking at ways to light "complex" subjects - that is, product shots that involved skin tones. 

I had Jessica modeling for me, wearing my Pandora bracelet. The first shot is simply lit from the left side by a softbox, with a reflector to the right. The second still has a softbox to the left, but there's also a softbox to the right and behind her. This softbox also half-lit the background, giving it a nice grey gradient.

And yes, that was the desired effect.

Keep Your Head On.

Instead of completing three different photo essays over the course of the year, we were told that we would instead be assigned to cover one of the opening nights of the Head On Photo Festival. 

From my perspective, this was a good thing. Not only was it getting us away from the dull briefs that we had been fulfilling since the beginning of our first year, but it was also giving us experience and throwing us head first into the industry. A real job in place of three ideas presented to us by our teachers - it sounded like a good idea to me. 

It didn't hurt that I felt I was on top of things. Since I shoot concerts, I'm no stranger to low light situations where your subject never stands still. I thought I had a pretty good idea about how to handle low light. If anything, shooting the open night should have been easy - the light would be unchanging and much more concert than the spotlights you get on a stage. 

But last night was nothing like I expected. 

I think I covered the three briefs I was given well enough, but I still feel like the night was a failure to me personally. 

Shooting shows is easy - you get there, and you know that your subject is up there on the stage. You don't need to know names; you don't even need to know faces. You don't need to speak to anybody - you just need to shoot.

But last night was nothing like that. I knew it was going to be a little more difficult going in - that I was actually going to need to speak to people and find things out - but I was nowhere near as prepared as I thought I was. And I'll be damned if my old timid tendencies didn't come back right at the moment that I needed them the least. 

When I got there, I spoke to the three people who were sitting at the front desk and did what I was supposed to - introduced myself, explained that I was shooting and asked if there was anybody I should know. They weren't entirely sure themselves, but they did describe what the Head On representative looked like. Her brightly coloured shoes would be hard to miss. 

After that, the little bit of confidence that I'd managed to scrounge up before walking in pretty much vanished. I took some shots of people, some long exposures, some detail shots, but eventually I started to panic a little. I felt that I didn't know what I was doing. I felt that I wasn't doing things right. 

But as the night progressed, things got better. My confidence started coming back. My shots started getting better. I grew more comfortable in my surroundings and took the shots that I thought I would need in order to fill my briefs. And then I let the gig photographer in me take over and just took photos of whatever took my fancy. 

Overall, the night wasn't a huge success. I screwed up a lot, but the important thing is that I know. So next time I can do better. 

And I have to keep reminding myself that it could also have been a whole lot worse. Being at the main opening, and at the TAFE of all places, I had classmates and teachers all around me, helping me out and encouraging me every step of the way. They, along with my best friend, are probably the main reason that I finished the night feeling more like a professional as opposed to the lost child I had felt like when the night began. 

But from this event, I can also say that I know for certain I'm not a huge fan of these sorts of jobs. I'll stick to concerts, and to weddings. Because in a way, those two things are similar - you go in knowing exactly what shots you need to get, who your main subjects are, and the lighting is unpredictable. 

That makes me sound crazy, but I suppose we like what we like. 

Ethel.

Yesterday my friend and I took an afternoon trip to Rookwood Cemetery so that I could attempt to get a decent shot for my assignment. 

My idea was simple. I wanted her to be a ghost, lingering behind in the cemetery even after she was "gone" from our world. So we traveled around to different sections in search of the perfect lighting and the perfect setting. 

The first shot I took was one in the Russian section of the cemetery; she was standing in a gazebo-type monument, and you could see all the graves behind her. But in the end, the shot just didn't work for me. The atmosphere was all wrong, and it was far too bright. 

Another shot I did was of her walking towards me between two rows of graves - so she wasn't attached to any one of them in particular, she was just "wandering". I feel that this shot might have been acceptable to me if only the two rows of graves had been closer together. As it was, the photo had too much sky, too much grass, and not enough subject. 

It was the middle shot that worked for me. 

To me, the atmosphere here feels right. She looks sad, she looks somewhat lost, and we even managed to find a girl's grave where the age was right - Ethel Francis died when she was twenty-three. The only thing off here is that she died in 1908, and my friend is clearly dressed for the twenty-first century. 

The process for achieving this photo is simple, but effective. I took two shots of the grave - one with my friend in it, and one without her in it. Then I layered them over the top of each other until they were perfectly aligned and lowered the opacity of the layer that contained my friend. The original shot had a washed-out sky, so I also added some more interesting clouds. 

Obviously, this wasn't exactly the shot that I had in mind. I couldn't find anybody else to model for me, so I only had my friend to work with. 

But even after the shot was done, I kept playing with the idea. And now I have another shoot scheduled for Saturday with another of my friends and her boyfriend, so I'm going to spend some time really planning out that shoot, looking for a location with the perfect light and fine-tuning the idea. Hopefully I will come up with something better - if not for this assignment, then for my portfolio at the end of the year.

IDEAS: Death.

I have photo ideas all over the place, so tonight I've decided to start things off nice and simple. Although it sounds morbid, I love death as a theme - its inescapable and everybody has to face it in the end whether we want to or not, and I would just like to play with it in photography and see where I can take things. 

From personal experience, I know that death is sudden - one day you're there, the next you're gone. And for those left behind it can be difficult to comes to term with this. Sometimes it feels like that person is still there, either because it hasn't hit home that this person is gone or because you can just sense them there. Either way, it brings up the idea of ghosts. 

I like the way that double exposures look, and I want to play with that here. 

At the current moment, the idea forming in my mind is two people in a cemetery, one of them mourning by a grave and the other comforting them with a touch to the shoulder or something similar. The comforter would be faded  in some places, indicating their status as a spirit. 

Inspired by this photograph: 

Time of day might be more toward sunset, signifying an end to things.

We've been lighting different things in prac lately, and today was all about lighting glasses with liquid. One of our briefs specifically was to capture pouring liquid in two different states - one frozen, and one smooth. 

My group was using the Broncolor floor-pack flash system, which gave us an upper hand over our classmates. While they were fiddling around with ambient light and shutter speeds, all we had to do was change the duration of our flash. First shot here is taken with the flash at 1/85 sec. The second is taken with the flash at 1/3250 sec.

So... Broncolor is officially awesome.

EXPERIMENT: Concert Photography.

Last time I wrote about concert photography, I set out two things that I wanted to try the next time that I shot a show: faster shutter speeds and smaller apertures.

Last night I shot another show. Dutch band DeWolff played at the Oxford Art Factory with Group and Lines, and The 59th Sound sent me along again to capture the show. 

The first thing I did when I found out I would be shooting this show was ask a friend of mine what the venue would be like. He told me there would be no barrier, that the venue was tiny, and that the lighting was generally shocking. Despite this, I held my hopes high. Because in my opinion, it would take a lot to have lighting worse than the Hi-Fi. 

And I was pleasantly surprised! The lighting, in my opinion, was wonderful - where the Hi-Fi tends to overuse their reds, the Oxford Art Factory stuck mostly to shades of blue, purple and yellow, which made for much more flattering lighting. 

My ISO ranged from anywhere between 2500 and 5000, though since this was my first time shooting on full frame, I've found that this doesn't bother me. Compared to the shots my 7D gets at the same ISO settings, the noise here is almost unnoticeable. 

My shutter speed varied a lot more than it usually would have - I went anywhere from 1/80th of a second up to 1/250th of a second, depending on the lighting and the action. This is a huge change from the way my shutter speed usually doesn't vary much from 1/125th. 

And my aperture, which usually stays at f/2.8 and doesn't change, moved up to f/3.5. I think it made quite a bit of difference. 

As I've already told Gwen today, last night I feel like I achieved a lot. It was the first time that I woke up in the morning feeling like maybe, just maybe, I had taken some shots that I could really be proud of. After editing, I don't feel like I got any stunners - but I do feel like I've grown as a concert photographer, that I've learned some important lessons, and that things can only keep going up from here.

View the entire gallery here. 

In prac on Wednesday we were learning how to properly light reflective metallic surfaces. I couldn't find a prop to take to class and so completely neglected to do so, and since my group was having some serious issues with our softbox (it kept firing when it shouldn't have and not firing when it should have!) I decided I'd just do the work at home instead. I did just that tonight, and this was my result. 

I don't feel like I've achieved exactly what I was supposed to, but at least I know that and I gave it a shot.

Bring Me The Horizon, Pierce The Veil and The Chariot.

Given my last experience at Sydney's Hi-Fi, I can't deny that I was a little worried about how last night would go. The last time I shot a band there, the lighting was terrible at best and I ended up cranking my ISO all the way to 4000. Having been there on Monday night to see a shot and taken to watching the lights for half the time instead, I had my fingers crossed for something good. And for the most part, I got it.

Obviously there is always potential for stage lighting to be better, but I think I got the best that the venue had to offer, and that's okay with me.

I still have a long way to go when it comes to getting great shots, though. I can never get them quite as sharp as I would like, and next time I shoot a rock band I instead to see if I can get away with some faster shutter speeds. 1/125 only works well when your subject isn't head-banging. I might also try for a smaller aperture, which might help a little with my focusing problem. This might end up meaning my ISO is up in the 2500+ section, but it shouldn't matter as long as I get the exposure spot on, right?

The full gallery can be viewed on The 59th Sound.