Rave’s UnderExposed Edition

This week’s edition of Rave has the UnderExposed exhibition on the front cover.  The montage includes one of my Afrirampo photos (just underneath the ‘-VE” of RAVE). 

The lead feature is a story I wrote about music photography to promote the exhibition, based on an interview with Time Off photographer Stephen Booth, one of the photographers exhibiting at UnderExposed, and Tim Steward from Screamfeeder, who are headlining one of the six live gigs at the exhibition space over it’s 3 week run (Screamfeeder are playing on Saturday 18 April).  The picture of Patience from The Grates at last year’s Splendour In the Grass accompanying the article is also one of mine.

It was a pretty tough challenge for my first effort at writing something for print, especially as the timeframe was tight, with a shortened working week due to Easter and everything for the magazine needing to be submitted by Thursday at the very latest (instead of the normal Monday).  The earliest that Tim and Stephen could be available for the interview was the Sunday night and so I spent a couple hours chatting to them then to get a photographer’s view and a musician’s view of music photography.  I spent Monday at work listening back to the recording on headphones, jotting down the times on the recording where the quotes I wanted to transcribe were and transcribed them on Monday night, ending up with almost 3,000 words of quotes for a 1,200 word article.  Tuesday night I wrote the article, culling over half the transcribed quotes in the process, and came up with a first draft of almost 1,700 words.  After some more culling it was down to just over 1,200 words.  I submitted it for review on Wednesday morning and after some expert subbing at Rave it was all done.  

You can read the article on Rave’s website – http://www.ravemagazine.com.au/content/view/14621/30/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 3:13 pm. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with , , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

4 Responses to “Rave’s UnderExposed Edition”

  1. Andrew McMillen says:
    April 15, 2009 at 3:16 pm

    Nice one mate – great result for a tight deadline! I love that you were listening to your own voice while working 😀

  2. Adam Weathered says:
    April 16, 2009 at 7:01 am

    Reads really well Justin. Like it.

  3. Stephen says:
    April 17, 2009 at 10:23 am

    Hey Justin. It’s a great read. I was very impressed by the coherency, flow and the content. Interesting, useful content, and excellent prose.

    Not surprised about the time it took — good writing is about application, fact-checking and revision. That all adds up to a fair chunk of time. And there just aren’t many shortcuts in that process. At least not that I’ve encountered over the last eight years.

  4. Justin says:
    April 21, 2009 at 10:29 am

    Thanks for the comments guys. Is good to get some feedback on my first proper attempt at this and find out that some people did read it and did enjoy reading it.

    Andrew – It was pretty freaky listening to my own voice on playback; it’s not something that has happened very often. I think I listened to enough of it that day that it did stop being really weird and I stopped thinking “do i really sound like that?”!

    Stephen – Yes, I don’t think there would be any shortcuts but I guess a lot of street press interviews wouldn’t have the luxury of talking for an hour and then having to listen and transcribe all that. Having said that the only other interview I’ve done was with Sophie Howarth for The Dwarf and although it was scheduled for 15 – 20 mins we ended up chatting for almost an hour! I think the thing I found hardest about putting this piece together was that it was an interview with two people coming from two slightly different angles on the subject. A lot of the interview moved from one side to the other; in some bits of the diccussion, like when we talked about band image, the discussion was mainly focused on Tim, whereas when we talked about the more technical/practical side of photography it was mainly Stephen. If it had been a interview with two members of a band or with two photographers it would have been a lot more straightforward. But still, I’m glad I did get dropped in the deep end a bit and did feel quite accomplished having done it.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.