Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Little change-up from the outdoor fall sessions…
Over the summer I worked on an assignment to photograph members of the West Suburban Symphony Orchestra. The photographs were going to be used in their print publications and needed to give a sense of the orchestra’s personality amidst all the necessary printed information about tickets, times, locations, programs and special events.
The designer, Renee (who is also a member of the orchestra), wanted the portraits to be traditional but friendly. They needed to say “Hey look everybody, we are bunch of talented, committed musicians that come together out of pure joy to perform in a symphony orchestra. We know what we are doing, many of us are full-time musicians outside of the orchestra, but we don’t get all uptight about it. We think you will like hearing us.”
To start, I photographed the conductor, Peter Lipari, in the studio. I shot about 5 different light setups and let Renee tell me which worked best for her design. She chose a classic split light set up.
The question remained — how to get a dozen portraits taken of other orchestra members under a tight deadline? If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed… We decided the easiest thing would be to bring my studio to the symphony. So a few weeks later I loaded up my lights and set up in the rehearsal room during the warmup time before a performance.
It was a special challenge to incorporate each musician’s instrument. There was only a 6-7 minute time slot for each portrait. Some instruments were huge (the sousaphone!). Some were dinky. Some were reflective. Some were mostly black. I found that I used most of the 6-7 minutes just to figure out the instrument positioning and thankfully once we nailed that, the expressions came naturally to the orchestra members.
Thanks to all the musicians for letting me into your world, behind the scenes before a performance. And here’s how the season brochure looks with the new images:
no comments