Rick’s Rants and Raves

Recently I was reading through some blog entries from Zack Arias hoping to learn a bit about band portrait photography. He was interviewed for another blog (now defunct, but available on Internet Archive) where he talked about the horrible press kit photos bands tend to use. He mentioned the Hall of Shame (the word they use isn’t quite so polite) for really bad band photos. In a brief (ha!) period of obsession, I went perusing the Hall of Shame.

I really like one of the themes of shame: “Nice Effort” These are folks who (evidently) published a band photo that had little more thought put into than “where’s the power button on this thing?”

Fortunately, I know I’ve progressed beyond this class of photo, but just a bit. My only band portrait to date was put together with about 15 minutes of planning (if you include loading my gear in the car) and about 20 minutes of post production. So, yes, I know it was taken in a bar, over a pool table, during a gig. But at least it wasn’t in somebody’s laundry room.

I also learned about some of the major cliches. It seems the step above “Nice Effort” involves someone saying “Hey, lets take your picture with this wall as the back ground.”

Or perhaps they thought, “Yo, there’s a train track next to Jimmy’s house. We should have you guys stand there!”

I’ll admit that as I first started trying to think of interesting locations for shoots, the first two ideas I had were a loading dock at a nearby warehouse (with really awesome brick!) and a train track thats close enough to for us to hear the trains (albeit faintly) from home. Fortunately I’ve learned of these cliches before I made these mistakes.

Another cliche is to have everyone in a circle looking down on the camera. I’ve seen other shots like this, but when it seems to be pretty common, the cuteness wears off.

The last cliche I’ll touch on is when the lead singer wants to make it obvious who the lead singer is.

Yeah, its amazing the other guys could fit in the frame with an ego that big.

So, my challenge now, is to figure out locations where I can make interesting shots in, what feels like, a not-terribly scenic town. The places I can think of almost immediately scream “trite” the moment I compose the shot in my head. Clearly I need to work on this more.