The Lonely Coming Down Photoshoot

Lonely Coming Down

My friend Danica from The Holy Bible called me up again about doing a photo shoot for another band she’s in, The Lonely Coming Down. It’s the law in Brisbane that if you play in a band, you have to have to be in at least one other band… (The best example of this is probably Tony Giacca who plays in Sixfthick and Side Effects and Young Doctors and Horrortones… and was also in Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side for a bit until he realised he was just in too many bands… at which point he passed on the bass playing duties to Dan Baebler. Who also plays in Sixfthick and Side Effects…)

Anyway, the brief from Danica for the Lonely Coming Down shots was ‘dark and brooding’.

I did have all these grand schemes and ideas for set-ups. Bill Henson had been in the news in recent days due to the controversy of his latest exhibition in Sydney, including police raids, threats of legal action and some unhelpful comments from the Australian PM, and as the lighting he uses in his photos has that ‘dark and brooding’ quality I was looking to try something similar.

However, it was pouring with rain, which would have made doing the shots I wanted to do outside by the river a bit problematic, so we just ended up doing some simple studio shots.

The set-up was very simple; a black background, one monobloc with a softbox positioned at the side and at about head height, and a black bounce on the far side, opposite the light.

Lonely Coming Down Lighting Set-Up

We did a few 3/4 length and full length shots but as they liked the close-up shots best we concentrated on those more. We talked out trying a second lighting setup but they were happy with the photos we’d got; so it was all very quick and easy.

Typical camera settings were around ISO 200, f6.3, 1/200

For the post production I desaturated some of the photos, to give them more of a fashion look, and did some of the usual b+w conversions and toning as Danica had also asked for b+w images to fit in with the overall ‘dark and brooding’ look. I also had to use levels to darken the background and make it completely black as some light from the softbox had fallen on it.

The light on right hand side is nice and soft but is probably a bit too harsh closer to the light on the left hand side, even though the light was on minimum power. But generally I was pretty happy with the results overall and learnt from my mistakes for next time.

Lonely Coming Down

Danica

Shishkin

Even though I had too small a depth of field on the shot below, meaning that Danica is not in focus, I really like this photo. I think it’s out of focus enought to get away with it. It’s got a nice 1960s vibe about it and reminds me a bit of Herman Leonard’s photo of Nico.

Lonely Coming Down

And because editing down my photos to only show my very best shots is my greatest weakness, there are some more photos from the session on flickr.

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