Photographing the Midsummer Music Festival

I was invited along to the Midsummer Music Festival in the nearby town of Gatehouse of Fleet to take photos of the bands performing last weekend.

In the studio, I can interact with the sitter, ask them to move this way or that, adjust the lighting and alter the background. But when it comes to musicians on stage, I have no control over any of these things. They move about, the lighting is often poor and constantly changing, the background usually interferes rather than compliments, and when there are more than one of them on stage, they tend to either spread out – leaving huge uninteresting spaces between them – or obscure each other with bits of instruments or entire bodies.

Performance photography, then, is about as far removed from portraiture as you can get while still pointing the camera at people.

In fact it was at the Midsummer Music Festival this time last year, when at I first tried out photographing musicians on stage and discovered these difficulties. Since then I have photographed The Sex Pistols Experience and Cash From Chaos playing live, but I’m hardly a pro in this department.

Still, I have learned a few tricks over the past year. For example, taking photos from closer to the side of the stage will help bunch up spread out musicians. If you move about a bit and use a zoom lens, sometimes you can isolate the head of a singer against a less busy part of the background. And when the lighting is poor you can compensate by increasing the ISO setting on the camera. Unfortunately, this has a side effect of making the photos “noisy”. However, if you drop them into black and white and play with the contrast levels afterwards, the photos can take on a “grainy” quality, reminiscent of old music-press photos, which add mood and atmosphere.

For me, then, it seemed a reasonable exchange. I get a free pass to the event and the chance to develop my skills in this area, and the organisers get some free photos for publicity if I manage to get anything halfway decent.

I had also been asked if I could supply the local paper with any halfway decent photos for post-publicity purposes, which, if they took, would also get my name spread a little further. And while this seemed like a great idea at the time, it ended up interfering with my photography.*

For the first 2 bands on the Friday night – The Ideal Crash and Sweet Relief - I was thinking about camera angles and shots that might make a reasonable newspaper image – nothing too fancy, just something that reports what’s going on.

It was about half way through the third band – a superb group called The Inflictors – that I stopped thinking about the newspaper and started thinking about what kind of images I would like to see. And then everything changed. I started enjoying myself much more, I tuned into the rhythm and movements of the musicians so I could start to predict where they were going to be by the time I clicked the camera, and the quality of the photos improved.

By the time I was onto the 4th act, John Otway, I was in my element and I shot some of my favourite performance photos to date.

The following night I started warming up with the first guy on, Dave Sutherland; I got into my stride with Quirkus and carried that through with The Geese (now a 5 piece band – they were only a 3 piece outfit when I photographed them for their CD cover last year), again, producing photos I was dead chuffed with. However, by the time King Creosote came on stage, my CFS tapped me on the shoulder to remind me it was there and my energy deserted me. I took a few photos, but my heart was no longer in it and I had to leave before the end to ensure I could make the 15-mile drive home in safety.

Below are a handful of my favourites from the evening, but you can find the full set of 50 or so images on my Facebook or Flickr pages.

As usual, click on any of the images for larger versions.



Cameron of The Inflictors


The Inflictors


John Otway with his 2-headed guitar


John Otway


Nicola of Quirkus


Blue of Quirkus


Michelle and Richard of The Geese

Links of interest:

The complete set on
Flickr
Facebook

The Bands
Friday line up
The Ideal Crash
Sweet Relief
The Inflictors
John Otway

Saturday line up
Dave Sutherland
Quirkus
The Geese
King Creosote


* and it turned out the newspaper weren’t interested in the photos I submitted after all, because they were all black and white and the paper prefers colour images

Facing The Weekend

Photo taken by Rogan

Over the next day or two I will start taking down the 130 or so photos stuck to the walls of my studio from last weekend's Spring Fling Open Studio event (see previous post).

It was a success on every level I can think of - in terms of response, feedback and keeping up my energy levels. Before I began, I thought perhaps I might be able to photograph 80 people over the 3 days. Secretly I hoped for a hundred. As I closed the door late on Monday afternoon, I had photographed over 170.

Amazingly, more than half of all the visitors who walked through the door agreed to take part. And the feedback and enthusiasm I received was wonderful.

This is what the first ones faced as they entered my studio (click on any of the images for larger versions):



KEY
1 - PHOTOS - not wanting the first visitors to face a completely empty wall, I figured having a few photos up first might help encourage people to take part. This included one my daughter, Meg; two of my son, Rogan - before and after his dramatic haircut; one of me, taken by Rogan, and 4 photos of friends who helped me 2 days before when I decided to dry-run the system - Graham, Danny, Mark and Ken. Andrew also helped, but the printer started playing up so I didn't get a photo of him up until later.

2 - REFLECTOR - the back of the reflector used to bounce a softer light on to the other side of the face - see below for more details.

3 - COMPUTER - bridging the photo between camera and printer, allowing me to convert the image to black and white and email a copy to anyone who wanted it.

4 - CHAIR - in order to minimise energy expenditure, I spent most of the weekend sitting down.

5 - OLD PRINTER - ready as back-up in case the new one failed. After all the hassle I'd had with it on the dry-run, when I discovered the new printer would only use the black ink cartridge if I lied to it, I thought it was wise to have one in reserve. Fortunately I didn't need it.

6 - STACK OF BLACK INK CARTRIDGES - I had no idea how many I would need. In the end, I only used about half the number I bought.

7 - OLD LAPTOP - used for displaying a slideshow of photos. However, it became clear quite quickly that no one was bothering with it - partly because it was too low down to see, but as there was no room anywhere to put it at a higher level, we didn't use it on Sunday or Monday.

8 - STEPLADDER - used as a seat for my assistant (my wonderful friend Mark, until about 3.30pm on Saturday, and Rogan the rest of the weekend), or for sticking the photos on the higher parts of the wall.

9 - CUPBOARD - stuffed full of miscellany not intended for display, so hidden behind the assistant/stepladder.

10 - TABLE WITH FORMS - so I could use the photos of the people, I had a Model Release Form for each of them to sign. It's a legal grey area, so this covered my butt. It also allowed people to leave their email address if they wanted more information about the book I'm going to create (see further down the page).

11 - VISITOR COMMENTS BOOK - and a bowl of sweets to encourage people to leave nice comments. However, only 16 visitors left a comment in it, and one of those was my daughter.


THE PHOTOGRAPHY AREA



Those who got their photograph taken would sit in the chair with their body facing the window, which acted as the main light source, then they would turn their head back to me and look into the camera. The textured backdrop worked as a background more interesting than white and not as ink-heavy to print as black. The reflector cast a softer light on the other side of their face, lifting it out of the shadows.

This set up allowed me to be at the right height to photograph them while sitting in my chair, and it removed the need for lights, which would have taken up more room and run the risk of getting knocked over, or bulbs burning out.

It was all about trying to keep things as simple as possible.

Below are a couple of photos of the studio after the weekend, with all the photos on the walls.





The exhibition was intereactive and grew as the weekend progressed. At 5.30pm on Monday, it was all over. However, this is not the end.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be putting all the images into a book called "Facing The Weekend", which I'll be publishing on Blurb.com for anyone who's interested. More on that when it's complete.