Recently I was contacted by Singer/Songwriter Issa to quickly come up with a set of images to support her album “Run with the Pack” which was being released in just six weeks time. Apparently a photoshoot in Italy a few weeks before hadn’t yielded the results required so a quick turnaround was needed back in the UK!
Issa’s studio of choice was York Photography Studio and all manner of technical wizardry was on hand as part of the hire. I normally shoot on location with only the equipment I can carry (and usually with just a few minutes to set up and shoot for most bands on a tour schedule) so it was a major bonus to have a full array of grip gear, backgrounds and even costume changes all on hand (for Issa, not for me). With Elara Christie as my assistant for the shoot too I knew that this was going to be a load of fun.
Having been very impressed by the wonderful work of Jake Hicks I wanted to use the opportunity of a full studio shoot to utilise coloured gelled portrait lighting. I’m well used to using coloured flash lighting in many of my band shoots (as can be seen in my portfolio) but much less so for portraiture. Jake is an excellent educator as well as photographer which inspired me to use this approach.
For most of the shoot I used a four light set up. Two gelled strip diffusers as side lights (one red, the other yellow), one blue gelled softbox at ground level to the front and a gridded key light beauty dish 45 degrees above Issa. The blue softbox to the front was used not to remove shadows but to turn them subtly blue. This, combined with the other colours combined to give an unusual and interesting colour pallet for a portrait - totally in keeping with the rock-star persona!
By feathering (moving the light slightly, varying the amount of light hitting Issa) the coloured side diffusers were used to emphasise more or less of the two colours involved. I think that these two images showing predominantly red were favourites of mine from the shoot. I love the sci-fi-esque look of these too.
Re-touching was used post-production for all images but I wanted to add a little more to one or two just to give Issa and the record company, Frontiers, more options when making their selections.
We, as a team, were very happy with the results from that evening and Frontiers went on to use the images as both the album cover and for the booklet shots. It’s always very, very exciting to go into a record store and pick up a record with my photographs featured, not least the cover shot!
Finally, Issa has used other images from the shoot as publicity photographs and these have been selected by various national music magazines in their interviews, features and reviews of her excellent album which you can buy here.
Jake Hicks runs some amazing photography courses and forthcoming events are listed here.
9 out of 10!