Hello and welcome to 'Out of the Darkroom' on AdoramaTV. I'm Ruth Medjber and
today in part 2 of this exhibition special I'm going to be talking you through
the process of creating the images that I exhibited in my solo show called 'Women of Notes'.
It's important for me in my work as a music photographer particularly
with Promo images to never copy styles between bands. Bands should always look
really different. They should almost look like their music. This project was no
different to me.
Now, shooting 12 different musicians over the course of three weeks and coming up with
new ideas for each shoot, was really, really difficult. So to get around this I
just almost collaborated with the musicians themselves. I opened it up to
them so that there was an artistic communication.
So I developed this questionnaire. The questionnaire was a little bit silly, a little bit informal I wanted to keep it
really fun, so I sent them questions like, was there any shoots that you've done
previously that you're really proud of? Was there any that you absolutely hated?
I also sent them stuff like send me your top five idolized bands that you loved
when you were a kid or who is it that you really like the look of? Once I had their
questionnaire back, it opened up my eyes to who these women were and how they
wanted to be perceived. That's really important to me. It was really important for
these women to come to the exhibition opening, see their photograph on the wall
and not look at it like a complete stranger, and go, yeah, Ruth got me, she got my style,
she got my music, she understood what I'm about and I'm proud of this picture.
Once the women are proud and happy with their image then so am I to be honest. Once I
had a clear sense of what these images should look like and how the women
should be perceived, I then invited the women into the studio for the shoot. Now
it's really important that I always say this time and time again that the studio
has a nice, warm, inviting atmosphere. Now, how I manage that is by having the couch
there. It's nice and comfortable. You bring people in straightaway. You offer them
a tea or coffee, a load of biscuits and then you invite them to stick on some music. So I'd
have playlists or streaming and they just put on tunes that make them feel at ease,
make them feel like it's part of their surroundings, their atmosphere. They
can relax and enjoy the shoot. Make sure that they know you know what you're
doing as well, so speak confidently about your project. Say this is the project.
This is who's involved. This is how its going to look like. It's going to be so
empowering, so positive, so everything and these women are going to want to give you
their best in front of the camera. Another thing that I'm always saying is
compliment people who are standing there in front of you. They're quite nervous. Every musician I
have in front of my lens are nervous so you have to make sure that they're doing
okay, that they're not frightened and they're not a little bit, you know, on edge and it
just makes people a little bit warmer and a little bit easier to get along with in the studio.
One of the ways of making the images look a little bit different from each other is
introducing props. This image of SOAK, who's a really great musician here in
Ireland, I made it look a little bit different by introducing polystyrene
hands. Now, I'm one of those people that goes around the shops or browses online
and picks up random props and saves them in a big cupboard and maybe doesn't know why
they're doing it, but for SOAK, I had all these hands and I arranged them all in a weird
shape and I kind of thought it would make a lot of sense if it looked like the
music industry was grabbing her, because the thing about SOAK is that she's really
young but then the main thing about this picture is that she's looking so
cool and confidently down the
lens with this little glint in her eye. She's like I got this, I can handle this. Very,
very simple. There is it teeny tiny bit of Photoshopping because
I ran out of hands on the structure so if you'll notice, a couple of them are added in
afterwards but when you saw them up on the wall you wouldn't notice anything
like that.
Another use of props in this exhibition was this image of Saint Sister. When the
girls got back to me with their questionnaire they had indicated that
they wanted to be shot in somewhat of a dream, so very flowing, very soft focus,
very much matching their music, so what I did was I just sparked the idea of
fairy lights, and then also to give this hazy filter almost to it, I literally
just picked up a couple of meters of muslin fabric, threw it over the girls
themselves and created this very soft effect. There's absolutely no Photoshop
going on in this image. It's exactly how it was captured in the lens. The lens,
though, is not quite your industry standard lens. I actually used a broken
lens. I have this really old 50mm 1.4 lens that has been knocking around
in my camera bag for about 15 years and it's broken, it's really broken. It gives
these mad hazes and glares and it's really soft and I can rarely focus it. Now I wouldn't use
it on a portrait session in general but I thought, for this image, then, well it
fit the bill quite perfectly. machines can be a great prop sometimes their effect
Smoke machines can be a great prop. Sometimes their effect
can be really, really overwhelming but in this image of MayKay, I'm actually shooting
her from underneath her. She's kind of coming above me over the lens which is quite
how she carries herself on stage. On stage she always seems to aim for the
music photographers and trash about, and, you know, mess her hair up and come and lean over us
and that kind of thing so for her shoot, I wanted her to give her
the same vibe that she gives on her live music performance, so I stuck on some
tunes, we had the stereo blasting, we had the smoke machine. It was very much
like a live performance for her and then, through that we got an image, that I think
replicates her live performance exactly. Another thing about this shot is that
she's wearing a coat that was designed by an Irish designer here, and it was
important for me this show to bring in as many different influences as I could to
show off all the talent that we have here and then if we look at this image
of 'Sleep Thieves', this whole image is very much concentrated on Sorcha's clothes. So
her skirt is fantastic, the top is fantastic.
They're borrowed from a local store and you'll find that if you're, you know, if
you want to style your images of your musicians but you don't have a stylist
working with you due to budget constraints, you can contact some of your local
designer boutiques and say can I borrow your clothes for a couple of hours and
once you sign a little insurance lease and promise to take good care of them and
once they know that it's for a good cause, they'll normally let you out of the
store with two or three bags of clothes which is what we did here with Sorcha. She
picked out all these fantastic outfits and they really, really make the shot. I took
inspiration from what she had picked from the clothes store so she was saying I
want to dress all in black and be super glam. To me, I'm going to put that on a red
back drop instantly and I'm going to give it a heavy vignette. I'm going to have this
powerful look in her eye that just says I own this shot. I am sophistication. I am style, which is
very much how she carries herself on stage as well. So this image just all came
together using about four different inspirations, from different designers and
boutiques and Sorcha and the music and it was just, instantly I knew I had to be
on red.
Adding vignettes and filters in post-production after the shoot is a great way of
altering the image's look and aesthetic. However, you can add filters and gels in
the actual shoot itself to save on post-production, like I've done here with
this band called Wyvern Lingo. What I've done is I've added a pink filter on one
side and a blue filter on the other side, and actually had no white light at all
on the day, The backdrop that they're standing in front of is actually white
but there's so much color in the lighting that you don't see it all. The only
thing I'd say with this technique is that the gels can create some really harsh, harsh
kind of lines and shadows, so I had to retouch these a little bit more than I
would with normal images just too soften those lines out of bit. Now, as standard I'm not a
photographer that favors a lot of post-production. I think it's mainly
because I'm not that comfortable doing it, but I knew a lot of these images, I knew
a lot of the ideas I had in my head
could only be created in post. Take this image of Heathers for example. So it's a
kind of a cut and paste collage, I suppose, of two images and they're great thing
about Heathers is that they're twin sisters. They are not identical twin sisters
so when you have them side by side, you can easily spot the differences but what
I wanted to do was merged the two girls together, so that would really
highlight the
similarities and also the differences between their faces so that we'd
acknowledge that they are two people but they're working as one band, and I
think just having the black and white versions of it worked quite well.
Obviously it could only happen in post production which is fine, I don't mind
using that as a tool. I do hire a retoucher from time to time because I'm
just not that comfortable doing so much retouching. I am, I like doing
everything in front of my lens so I hire a re-toucher and I have this really
great re-toucher who comes in and I'll say to her, this is what I want this to look like and
I might have sketches or examples that kind of thing. In particular for
this image of Lisa Hannigan, which you'll see is a double exposure. Now it's not a
double exposure that I could have done in camera at the time, because, due to
time restrictions and that kind of thing, plus, you know, the exposure is quite
different. One of them's in studio and one of them is out on the seafront, so doing that in
camera would be quite tricky, but I knew exactly how I wanted this image to look. So
once you know what you want, you can very easily then find a re-toucher who will
work alongside with you, and my re-toucher is great because she's just so meticulous and
so patient, where I'm not. I just, you know, draw on things and go it will do. She's brilliant, she takes
the time and she listens to me and together we make portraits that both of
us can be really proud of but she takes what's inside my brain and puts them out
there into the real world and without her, to be honest, these post-production
images wouldn't have happened. This image of Sinéad White, I'm going to come cleann and say we
totally just ran with an idea that we had. The whole shoot process might have
taken us a little bit longer than
the rest of them, but I think it worked out well in the end. Sinéad had sat
down with us and told this great story of how she was supporting a different
musician and he came up to her after and said 'oh, you can be quite aggressive on
stage' and that's totally out of character for her. She's not an
aggressive person so we got her to smear her lipstick off and just rant, scream out to the side of the
frame and it's probably one of my favorite images of the show because it
just shows pure emotion and this response words that someone had said and I got
really tied in the whole context of what the show is about.
Sometimes doing an exhibition like this, you really want to push the boundaries and do something
exciting and new that people might not have seen before but there's other times
when a traditional portrait really makes the most sense
depending on the person that you're shooting. These sisters are go under the
name Feather and Loah are a perfect example of that. When they arrived and they
started getting ready and I could just see how close they were and how happy
they were and then I just saw the outfits they were putting on which were absolutely
blinging. I mean they had gorgeous gold dresses, gold trainers, skirts, everything.
They just became the photograph. I really felt like I don't need to be putting a
lot more into this. I don't need to be putting my style on top of theirs.
Their style was so strong as it was, so my job as a photographer was just to show
how smiley they were in the images, and one of the things that they said while
we were doing the shoot was that they had previously worked with a
lot of photographers in the past, that photographers would always make them look
quite serious and quite sullen as they thought it showed their face the best.
And I though, that's madness. These girls are so happy and so smiley. Let's capture their smiles.
For me, this project is only the start. I've got two more exhibitions to get out of
this, so I'm going to be at this for a whole year but I hope you've enjoyed seeing my
process and seeing the images from the show. If you'd like to watch more videos
subscribe to the Adorama YouTube channel. If you'd like to brush up on your own
photography skills, then check out the Adorama Learning Center. If you have any
feedback for me, then please leave them in the comment section below.
Thanks and I'll see you again soon.