BIMM Brief – Reflection

Well, as we get to the end of the academic year, it’s been a whirlwind of collaboration between University Of Wolverhampton and BIMM Birmingham. 18 Photographers from UoW were split into pairs and worked with 9 recording artists from BIMM in Digbeth,

Dealing with a “Client” was outside of my wheelhouse in the photography field but I have a professional manner that I engage when dealing with customers and suppliers that I work with in my day job.

Trying not to be too businesslike and to be engaged with the band members offering my compliments when i thought they did amazing. And let’s face it, these students are nmothing short of massively impressive. They have written songs, music and then arranged it and performed it in front of countless lieve audiences, sometimes made up of their friends, coursemates, lecturers and often in front of unknown audiences. I’m in awe of the guts that these musicians who every time they pick up their instruments.

Shoot One – BIMM Rehearsal Rooms

Brian and I worked together to get them engaged and we did the first shoot in the BIMM rehearsal rooms, followed by a studio shoot in our Wolves photo studio and then followed up with a live gig, in Soho, London.

To work with them in the BIMM space we communicated via whatsapp as that is what tool they were used to using and it proved very useful and in most cases there were few delays in comms from the band. I used my chosen camera gear and had a few photos put of it that I was happy with. Some of the photos are from too high an angle and some have other band members obfuscated by the singer or keyboardist etc. It was a tight space to get into but I was happy with the final four images I got from the shoot.

The band were less stoked with the black and white images so they asked me for a colour version of them. I have no issue with this but I think that some of the photos just work better when disregarding the strange stage lighting and relying on the basic palette of black and white.

Shoot Two – Wolverhampton Photography Studio

This shoot was my most challenging section of the whole year. I was sweating profusely all the way through the shoot as I wanted to ensure that it all went as smoothly as possible with few distractions or mistakes. Brian and I worked together taking it in turns to capture the images of the band in their different poses, positions and setups. I put a lot of time into gathering some props together so that we could dress the set a little for the band when they arrived.

I didn’t fancy a plain white set and the moodboard that the band had sent us spoke to this point also. The props and set up worked well, Brian and I took some wonderful photos of the band using a bunch of sofas, chairs, lights and even a set of dominoes. The plain white scoop was beginning to get a bit tiring so we put up a couple of gels on the lights to allow a yellow and mauve style mixup for the frame. It kind of looks like the old refreshers sweets of old.

The colours helped with some differences in the shots but Im not 100% sure that the members of Wooden Dog were happy with it as a choice. No bother though we took all the props out and then did a couple of stripped back shots in front of the plain white scoop which I thought came out well.

I also tried a favourite shot of mine where I lay on the floor and get the group to all look downwards at me. I do it with cosplayers at comic cons and get some good results, but the background, i.e. the roof space was too messy so it didn’t work out too well.

The band said they were happy with the whole experience and have used some of the shots on social media since, which I’m happy about.

My four favourite shots from this studio shoot are:

I particularly like the line up of them in front of the white scoop wall as it leaves enough room at the top of the frame for text, logo, or even gig details.

Shoot Three – Live Gig Soho

After the uncomfortable setting of being in the studio with the group I was able to follow them to a live gig in Soho, London where they would perform early on in the bill at the Spice Of Life pub and venue.

The band were there early enough to get outside and do some shoots in the streets around Soho but their families were with them after travelling to London from the Midlands so I couldn’t take them away. They spent the time enjoying themselves with their aunts, uncles and grandparents, some of whom were being emotionally invested in this whole project.

As there was a lack of time for this I spoke with some of the relatives of the band and explained my limited role in the evening and they were grateful too that I had travelled from Shrewsbury to document their live performance in this venue.

As soon as I found out where they were performing and started their load in, I also followed them and set up my camera backpack so that it would be easy to change batteries and even resort to using the flash if necessary. I had two cameras on me, the Canon 5D and the Leica Q3 so I was covered in the event of a hardware failure on one of the bodies.

I found I was far mor comfortable doing shoots like this when the band are concentrating on their tasks and I can move around like a ghost capturing some photos that they might hopefully like and use in their promo media, either on social or print.

It was a good shoot, apart from the lighting being a bit on the tricky side but I enjoyed my evening walking around trying to take some images of the crew as they did their thing.

I found that the photos were easier to edit in this environment too as there was no clean surfaces to remove any imperfections from. There is a little noise in some of the shots too but this is more acceptable in the type of dark shoot that this venue led to.

My top four photos from this shoot are as follows.

Shoot Four – BIMM Live

Wooden Dog were due to play at a BIMM event at the Night Owl in Digbeth so we asked Sam if we could attend to take some more photos of the band in action. It was primarily for Brian who had no images of the band playing live yet, as he didn’t get to the Soho gig.

As discussed in this post, the plan didn’t work out as expected and by the time I’d got inside Wooden Dog were exiting stage right. It was good to see them and their other colleagues who were showcasing the talent of the BIMM university in thsi wonderful venue.

Brian disappeared once he’d realised we’d missed the Wooden Dog band, but I was there and had paid for three hours parking so may as well make the most of it. I stayed and took photos of the other artists and bands who were performing on the stage.

The lighting wasnt as tricky here as it had been in The Spice Of Life so it was easier to use some faster shutter speeds to capture the action. I also experimented a little with a bit of focus pulling and zoom pulling from a bit further back to see if I could capture some of the dynamics of the gig, with the audience being in the foreground.

My four favourite shots are here below, but don’t contain any Wooden Dog shots.

Conclusion

Overall then, this brief took my outside of my comfort zone, I did a lot of research on the venues and the photographers that inspired the Wooden Dog band. I built up a solid relationship with them and have been invited to go and shoot them again, but I was on holiday in Venice at the time.

Wooden Dog were a pleasure to work with and they were excellent at collaboration, and I hope that I gave them at least two or three photos that they can put to use in the future.

I think having a single artist might have been more in my wheelhouse as I could have done some more urban photography with them, where WD were very focussed on the style of photography they were needing. A single person might have been easier to wrangle into using Drone shots or even being a little more dark and mysterious.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked working with WD and in colour too, but I feel some of the shots I made worked better in black and white. Offering the band the choice was a conscious one especially after we had already discussed their mood board and expectations for a photo shoot.

I had to learn about the flashes again in the studio and using gels on lights too to get the effects we were after. The flash triggers were pretty standard and aside from sharing them between Brian and myself we were pretty efficient at operating the studio gear.

The editing also seems like a difficult part of the process for me, as I tend to edit my work as little as possible. Mainly a bit of Lens correction, uprights and perspective correction but very seldom am I to be found wiping out details from shots. I have used some of the tools since with one of my photos of a tree in a potato field to tidy up the background so it is proven to be a useful exercise. Using the Split Frequency add in from Sam also helped with tidying up some of the faces in the shots too.

Whilst I’d like to work with musicians in a gig environment or even on a tour, I don’t think that I find the studio space that enjoyable and as such I think that that mood might rub off onto the subjects.

Overall I was happy with the quality and quantity of usable images that i took out of the exercise and have included these in the PDF for the submissions.