While at the Soda Bar, I ran into Fkenal friend Dan Brennan, a fellow photographer and someone whose work I admire. We had a nice chat and I told him a bit about what I'm doing with this series of band group shots. I'll illustrate with these shots of Fever Sleeves, who were headlining.



I'm popping a flash 2-3 times from different places in each 20 second exposure. This way I can mimic a multiple light setup, only I have to create it around the subjects during the long exposure. And recreate again for each shot, adjusting this or that to get a certain effect.

I have to keep a lot of technical stuff in mind while I'm doing this, but I'm practicing at visualizing where the lights need to and just let it happen without too much thought. Hopefully after a year of doing this, the mechanics of this method will become as automatic to me as they are for shooting live shows. NOT that shooting them is something that comes effortlessly, but the effort is in the composition and timing, not how to set my camera. When I see the first preview on the LCD, my fingers are automatically adjusting the settings to get a better shot, and that's where I'd like to be for group shots too. 

I see a lot of people who call themselves "music photographers", but they don't shoot live shows. They shoot musicians in a studio, which is really just portraiture. It's important to be able to light someone well and I've done a lot of that in my time, but it doesn't call for a tremendous amount of creativity. Once you know the basic formula, you can just crank out shot after shot. In fact, just by using one flash pop from the left, it's easy to get a standard looking group shot.



But everyone does that. I want to do something different.

I don't think you can capture a band's look without shooting them live, while they're in the process of creating music- the very thing a band exists for. Playing music is trancendant activity, the true self can shine through all of the proper demeanors and little inhibitions we construct in order to be polite members of a society. During the act of making music, you can see how they move when they're too busy to keep up the emotional façade of appropriateness. Some people are nice and calm until they get on stage and you can see exactly who they are inside. This is when you should take their picture.

But a set is only about 45 minutes, so for the other  23+ hours of the day, they are just regular people who aren't on a stage. But that spirit is still what I'm trying to capture. All these locations are just right around the corner from the venue. I'm not just shooting them, but their environment, a quiet urban landscape. I'll show them where to stand and move them around to cover up as many streetlamps in the background as possible. I don't really pose them, though. I want to see what they choose.

The long exposures smooth out time, so there's no cars on the street or people walking through the shots. In a group shot, long exposures also add in the same element of unpredictability that comes from shooting someone on stage. Someone moves a little too much and gets blurry, I might pop a flash from a slightly different spot- it all adds to the uniqueness of each image.



When you ask someone to pose for a photograph, they make a choice about what person they want to present to the world. Some people smile, some people freeze, and there's always one joker who makes goofy faces. But we make that choice to be the person who gets frozen in time.

Or melting a bit, if they can't stand still enough for 20 seconds at a time.



And that's what "You don't take a photograph, you make it" means to me.