Photography Project: Initial Ideas

This week we are going to produce our Photography Project. We were required to do a photo-shooting project of portraits for Creative Media. In the beginning of the term, I was thinking to take pictures of people  who are living in the life style of 'carpe diem'.  My first initial idea was to take pictures of a musician playing his/her instruments.

The reason why I choose musicians is that they are very passionate when they are producing their work. They remind me about John Lennon who was murdered after being photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 1980. He was a member of the Beatles, a band that they described themselves 'more popular than Jesus' (The Beatles Bible, n.d.). Most of the musicians are passionate on creating music and most of them are down to earth, and for me this is one of the reasons why the music plays an important role in terms of cultural significance.

I plan to do the photo-shooting in the studio, and photograph one or two musician(s) playing his/her instruments. In the studio, it would be hard to replicate the environment of the stage, which mostly a bit dark with strong and heavy RGB lights, and as a result, I am planning to photograph with studio light which are more white and closer to daylight rather than dark and black. Also, I am planning to edit the photos to make the photos look better, and some of them will be in Black and White (B&W). 

Before going out for photo-shooting, it is essential to do research. Below was a photograph by American music photographer Jay Blakesberg in 2000. 


Beck, Over Crowd, San Francisco, CA, 2000

There are not much information about the photograph, such as either it is shoot with analogue film or digital, but after magnified the photograph, we can see that there is some noise, and the texture seems to be analogue being developed and scanned. Blakesberg took the shot at his eye level on the stage, as we can see that the photograph was taken above ground. This helped focus on the main character of the photograph, Beck, while it was lucky that the shadow (probably some cloud appeared) was seems to be underneath Beck's foot. It was a photograph of Beck jumping on stage, and Blakesberg created a feeling that he jumped over the audience, as he cropped off the part of the stage. The composition not only created a feel that Beck was flying over his audience, but also created a contrast that Beck was the star in the sky, and the audience was down to Earth. The photograph inspired on making effects with the compositions and the environment of the location. 


Reference

The Beatles Bible (n.d.), John Lennon: "We are more popular than Jesus", available at https://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/03/04/how-does-a-beatle-live-by-maureen-cleave/ , reviewed at 15 FEB 2024.

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