Music Photoshoot Ideas

After meeting with our band (Are You a Wizard?), we went over their ideas for what they wanted and outlined some ideas that we thought would work well for the band's style and genre.
Are You a Wizard? wanted a shoot on location at a party, where they were sitting on the sofa drinking beer and eating pizza. Myself and Lucy weren't too sure on this idea as it may have been hard to get the party to look authentic and we also thought that there may be too much happening in the picture and draw attention away from the band. We managed to convince them of this and instead decided on having a picnic in a forest, possibly with some destruction in the background.
We decided that we wanted natural looking shots of the guys having a laugh in the forest as if Jess, Lucy and myself were not there. We thought about images facing the sun, looking up into the trees, looking down at the band, the members far or close to the camera, etc.
Other ideas we came up with was to have the band in a tight corner, and if we could get hold of a fish-eye lens, take a picture of them in the corner. This would give a weird visual effect as the area would appear larger than it actually is.
The studio shots are going to appear like a police line up, with their names alongside and their roles in the band. We are hoping to re-create this Blink 182 photoshoot, as this is the sort of style and genre the band play.



We were also thinking of playing around with an idea that we had previously seen in Eleanor Hardwick's work, where the models are "plugged" in to electrical products. Our idea was for the band to bring along their amps and guitars, and plug them in.



We thought about making the studio shoots simple, using tried and tested methods to show the audience what each member plays and trying to bring out their personality. We thought that having shots taken down the length of their instruments would be a sure fire way to acheive this; we could then put text along the instrument (such as member name, instrument, age, etc).
We also thought that group shots were a good idea to show chemistry within the band and show the connection between the four of them. We would acheive this by using different levels to alter the set-up and make the shots more interesting to look at. This would also help to give the photo a new angle due to the different levels.

Examples of our work

Location Ideas

Photographer: Jill Furmanovsky

Jill Furmanovsky was born in Zimbabwe in 1953. She is a well known photographer known for her iconic rock pictures, especially Oasis, with whom she released a book "Was There Then - A Photographic Journey with Oasis"
She has also photographed well known bands such as The Clash, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Blondie and many more. She has also produced music videos for Oasis and The Pretenders.



This picture of Amy Winehouse I particularly like as it is completely different to what you would expect from an image of an artist. Furmanovsky has changed the way in which portrait photography can be undertaken; she is like a fly-on-the-wall and takes portraits of artists when they are being natural and doing what they do. I think it is a beautiful shot of Winehouse as it is completely different to pictures that were being taken of her at this time, most of the pictures taken were of Winehouse all done up or drugged up.



I like this shot as it shows the Gallager brothers before they were torn apart by arguments. It is simple, and I like how they are focused on the camera and not posing for it.



I love this shot as Courtney Love is lit really nicely and is the only person in the picture that you can clearly see. Everything else is dark and you can only just see it; another way of doing this would be to use depth of field to make the people out of focus except for Courtney. I think that the way lighting has been used to accentuate certain areas of the picture is really clever and makes it appear more dramatic.

Photographer: Anton Corbijn

Anton Corbijn is a Dutch photographer, music video and film director. He was born in the Netherlands on the 20th May 1955, and began his career in 1983.
Corbijn has photographed many musicians over his time, his most famous being U2. Other stars he has photographed include Johnny Depp, Morrissey, Depeche Mode, Artic Monkeys, Kurt Cobain, Keith Richards, Bee Gee's, Johnny Cash, Steven Spielberg, Metallica and Clint Eastwood.



This photograph was taken for U2's album "The Joshua Tree" released in 1991. It was taken in Death Valley, USA, in the december of 1986. It is amongst one of the most well known images of U2 Corbijn ever took. He went on to photograph more album covers and magazine images for U2 and also Bono respectively. The composition of the image is fairly unusual as the band is squashed together in one corner looking out over the desert, whereas the audience can see the desert and environment behind them. Corbijn used a panoramic camera to make the most of the amazing surroundings; "man and environemt, the Irish in America".
The picture below is a photograph of Bono taken in Miami 1996. Corbijn is emphasising the "bad-ass" look that Bono naturally has, although the cigarette is a massive cliche, it does help to emphasise this. I think that it is a very strong image of Bono because of the stance and composition. He has been placed centre stage of the photograph and the way he is looking out of the corner of his eye is quite threatening.



Corbijn has a unique approach to photographing bands, as he likes to stray from the norm and make them appear to be more natural and not to "stiff". Some examples:

Massive Attack - London, 1998.



U2 and Greenday (Bono and Billy Joe)



Depeche Mode - Marrakech, 1996.



Looking over these photos I wouldn't have guessed that they were in bands together (excluding example 2). The way they have been photographed is different to what you would expect from a band photo, as normally they would be stood in a line with their hands in their pockets. Corbijn's images caught my attention because he tends to "wash" all of his images in a single colour; on his website (www.corbijn.co.uk) his portfolio is separated into colour sections (black, brown, blue and colour). All of the images have different types of backgrounds that Corbijn discovered with the bands and decided to try different shots and see if he could get a good shot.

Layout Examples

Open publication - Free publishing - More the runaways

I particularly liked page 23 (the image on the right next to the top 10 films of the year feature). I found the image powerful with the text concealing the face as it draws further attention to the image. It means that the audience tend to read the advert and find out what it means; it is also on the right hand side of the magazine, which gelps to get the readers attention as we generally look at that page first as when you turn the page, this is the first one we see.