What inspires you?
We made it to February! This month I am talking about what inspires my photography.
Inspiration
Music inspires me and influences my mood constantly, I soundtrack my entire day - but it can’t inspire me directly visually, for that I watch a lot movies! I absolutely love movies and great cinematography is the main influence on my work. I want my concert stills to look like still frames from a movie, from composition to colour grading. I have some movies I have watched at least 50 times because they are first and foremost awesome movies I can escape into but also feature stunning cinematography that I can just analyse and enjoy over and over. I would absolutely love to shoot stills on a big movie production, but I am not quite sure how to ever make that dream come true.
I have to admit I don’t study a lot of still photography online, I find tiny SoMe pictures a terrible representation of stills. I go crazy if I always mainly look at my own and others work in SoMe posts. This is why I recommend you make a website, make blog posts, look at photo books, make your own books or magazines, print some pictures. Do more with your pictures than just post them to SoMe. So I don’t spend much time actually looking at concert photography online, and apologises to my colleagues but I deliberately avoid your pictures of any band I work for. It’s not that it isn’t great work, I just don’t want your pictures of say Zar Paulo stuck in my head when I shoot them, I want it to be pure intuition when I work with no direct references. What I do absolutely want is a lot of movie frames in my head for inspiration, such as these from the great Roger Deakins:
In movies that take place at night, in cities or dark spaces, you will see a lot of contrasty directional coloured light, similar to concerts. Both Blade Runner movies, The Batman, Collateral, Miami Vice 2006 are great examples and these movies inspire me greatly. If you want some great cinematography inspiration, check out this movie from Thomas Flight.
Colour grading in movies inspires my work too (when it’s good, not that awful flat log-style clean Netflix look), the careful grading for an overall consistent look is something I aim for. If I am delivering say 50 pictures to a band I will do 4-5 colour grading correction runs in Lightroom at the end, sometimes I go nuts over this and can’t stop, I need to get the whole set to have a similar look and feel, not so that all my concerts look similar, I choose a style (based on Fujifilm film simulations) that fits the mood of the concert, but for that show it needs to be consistent.
For compositions I so envy that cinematographers get to shoot from any angle they like, especially straight on. Only on stage can I shoot level with the band, from the floor the stage towers 2-3 meters above me and it is an ugly angle and wrecks the possibility for layering the composition to have band members in the background. Maybe I need stilts!
That is basically what happens inside my head during a concert, I listen and feel the music and shoot on emotions and subconsciously there is a lot of movies running in the back of my head triggered by the colours and the light!
What inspires you? Would love to hear your comments!
January gigs
Normally, January is super low on jobs and super high on Winter depression, but this year January has been good. Been able to ride my bike a lot, and I have had 8 exciting gigs so for once the longest month of the year has gone ok. I am very thankful for that, here is a few highlights:
August Rosenbaum playing in Cisternerne, a former aquifer now used for exhibitions and underground:
Two fantastic Arena shows for Danish artist PIL
Danish artist Jada playing a unique arrangement of her songs with Copenhagen Phil orchestra, this was absolutely magical:
Lightroom tip - fix the colour wash
I mentioned I spend a lot of time colour grading, and every concert and event photographer knows the dreaded colour wash, when the entire scene is washed in one ugly narrow band of colour from LED lights. This might look ok to your eye at the concert, but looks horrible on a camera sensor. Fortunately you can save a lot of this in Lightroom.
‘Darkroom Zen’ on YouTube has a great movie explaining how to fix extreme color tints that generally is the way I do it for pictures like the above. I don’t want to entirely remove the colour cast and make every single picture look like it had white light, it is fine for a scene to have a cold or want tint (like in the movies!). I want to gain back some tonality and separation between the colours (such as the singer and the background in the pic above) and this technique can help save some ugly raw files. If you use Fujifilm cameras, start off by switching between the film simulations, Classic Chrome is great for cool scenes I find and Classic Neg is good for warm scenes and for correcting a blue/magenta colour wash.
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Thank you for reading, feel free to share this with anyone, and comment or send me suggestions and questions. See you next month.
Never thought of using movies for inspiration. I currently lack of inspiration, so I’ll think about this. Really interesting, thanks for sharing.