Amy Lewis Dead Giraffe Shoot
I’ve been wanting to get into shooting models for clothing companies and the like, for some time now. I had a few lined up but nothing concrete.
Then on 2nd December this yea Southampton was ‘dumped’ on with a whole bunch of snow. Obviously my first thought was to see who was about to shoot some flicks. Luckily I had been talking with Jay at Dead Giraffe Clothing about doing some photos and as he lived well close I got some T’s and got the extremely aesthetically talented Amy Lewis on the blower! She’s was at work but had an hour for lunch for the shoot.
Luckily the snow in my back garden hadn’t been touched so we set up and got bloody cold!
Being used to shooting bands, it was refreshing to work with someone who actually likes being photographed, and knows how to do said thing. I set up a pose, got the lighting right (after one of my many things that can go wrong, did) and Amy just started posing. It was great. Usually I have 4 or 5 awkward looking nerds in front of me who are all thinking ‘I’m in a band, I don’t have to look good’…. Let me tell you, you ruddy do! But with this I only had to give a couple of ideas, I just shoot away.
I was really into the results and as far as I know Jay and Amy were digging them as well.
You can see them above and make sure you check out www.deadgiraffe.co.uk
Crazy Arm
Last night I went to see my brothers in Rock Crazy Arm at the Joiners. I love watching that band, they a properly one of the best bands in the UK right now and have better songs, better stage show, are better musicians then 99% of every other band banging out the same old crap on the music circuit these days.
I wanted to talk about the images I shot with them and if you haven’t heard them, you’ve been missing the hell out!
These images were some the last I did in my make shift studio over Reskue in Southampton. I rented it for the use of my old iPod that I had to hold the hard drive in place with masking tape. It was a sweet deal.
I really miss being able to use my Bowens studio lights now that I don’t have a studio but location photography is hassle to say the least without dragging along a bunch of massive lighting kit.
The images shot outside were interesting too. These were done in the days before I had my radio flash triggers so I was relaying on my slaves I got from Jessops year ago. It wasn’t the best or easiest way of working. If you’re looking to use more than one flash, or any flash for that matter, I can’t recommend getting radio triggers more. They make everything 8000x easier!
I was really happy with how these turned out and it was at a time when I was only just getting my shit together with photographing bands, and with the limitations I had on equipment and experience, it couldn’t have worked out better.
Since these photos were taken Crazy Arm have had a line up change and are sounding rad as ever. Last night I booked them in for a new shoot new month so keep an eye out for those.
In the mean time get over to http://www.myspace.com/crazyarm
Young Political Activists
This was a piece of work I did in my final year at uni.
It began as a smaller set of portraits about the Young BNP. I’m not in any way a supporter of said Party, but I found it really interesting the types of kids that were heavily involved in this, and spent a lot of their time organising and working with the BNP.
Most of the kids I spoke to were not what you’d expect when you hear BNP, they weren’t skinheads who spent their time getting drunk and smashing things up, but normal kids with very strong beliefs.
This was what my documentary was getting at, I wanted to show that it wasn’t just these stereotypical people who were members of this party and who believed in those types of things. Normal, everyday kids were as well.
Now obviously this was met at uni with certain cautious feeling. One way of looking at this work would be to say that it was pro BNP. I can’t stress enough that it wasn’t, isn’t and never will be! If anything I thought of it as a warning about how popular this party has become and how “normal” and everyday their members are now. This to me is a scary thought.
After spending a few months travelling the country and meeting these kids, I became really interested in the ideas that people had when thinking about certain political parties. I had no idea what these people were going to be like when I went to meet them and never had any problems at all. They were all perfectly nice and hospitable, even in Burnley! And so the project developed into a study of this idea. I started meeting people from other political parties, talking to them and making portraits. The work became about this idea that people from certain parties looked a certain way or were from a certain background, and so I began to explore these stereotypes people have.
Here is a small selection of the work I did, but to see the documentary in full please visit http://davidransom.org/ypa.html
Failsafe
This is Failsafe.
They are an awesome rock band from Preston. I’ve known them for some years now as we used to tour together in my old band.
The images below were some of the first I shot about a year ago, and I really wanted to make them interesting and visually engaging.
We set up in my back garden at my house, which made things a lot easier mainly because I could just the houses electric. This meant of course, I could use my Bowens lights outside.Something I really like doing. It’s a much stronger light source than any of my portable lights and so gives a much crisper texture to a subject.
I can use with this idea of a tea party outside, where I got a bunch of props including teapots and mugs etc. We even toyed with the idea of involving my pet rabbit in a Mad Hatter’s Tea party vein, but I didn’t want to freak the poor little fella out with flashes, so decided not to!
It’s really nice doing things like this as it’s always really fun and it relaxes the band, and so you get much more casual poses from them. One of the main things the guys said was they didn’t want ‘Tough-guy’ poses, so having them all messing about outside was a really effective way of getting over that.
We shot a few in this setup which worked great, and then we did some close ups of head and shoulders. I seem to remember I was ‘in-between’ lens at the time and the only wide angle lens I had was my 15mm, so everything ended up being very fish-eye’d, something I try to avoid these days, but with the head and shoulders images I think it really added something to them. Fish-eye lens (not to be confused with Fish-eye adaptors which should be avoided at all costs) are really good at allowing you to get really close to your subject, whilst keeping loads of the background in. This is why they are used, and I use them, so much in Skateboard photography.
If you visit their MySpace at myspace.com/failsafemusic you can see the image they used from this shoot as part of their site design. Also check out their music because it’s bangin!
I have recently reshot the guys in a park down the road and the results are on my website www.davidransom.org.
Enjoy
6:57
I thought I would talk about some of my none band related photography today.
Shooting bands is something that I love doing, but it isn’t an everyday thing. Not yet anyway! I actually find that I shoot skateboarding a lot more.
This was one the things that got into photography in the beginning with my dad’s 35mm.
About a year ago I started hanging around with some guys from Southampton and Pompey who were filming for a local scene video. It was called 6:57 which is a name derived from the Pompey firm who used to wait for the 6:57 train to get into Fratton station when they played Southampton. The video was a play on that rivalry.
It was really good fun driving up and down the country shooting photos with these guys and we were all really stoked when the video came out and was really well received, and better still I got my photos in a Silver Screen in Sidewalk magazine. Silver Screens are like a ‘making off’ type article with an interview with the maker(s) and some shots. It was my first article in the mag and I was well pleased!
Here are some of the images from said article and some extras of the other guys.
Oresteia
These images are of a great band from Hythe called Oresteia that I shot a few weeks ago.
This was the second attempt at the shot as on the first time round I had managed to leave my expensive flash triggers at the bottom of a set of stairs after shooting some skate photos in the morning. Luckily they were still there after 10 hours on their own and we rescheduled!
What I really like about these images are the fact they are are really different from what I normally shoot. To me they seem a lot more ‘mature’ and so suited the band really well. That is something I think is really important in photographing a band, actually listening to the band and shooting in accordance to that.
The chair idea actually came from the band, which I always love because it’s great when a band has ideas for the shoot instead of me telling them what to do all the time, it makes it feel like everyone is getting what they want out of the work. Anyway the reference for these images were bands like Flaming Lips, Talking Heads and the Pixies. All their images have this kind of weird, quirky feel to them without being what I call “Wacky”! Wacky is a scary term in the world of photography that should be avoided at all costs unless you know exactly what you’re doing!
These images were taken with my usually set up of my Metz and Vivitar flashes, but the main difference I think with this shoot was that it was one of the hot muggy days, at the end of the Volcanic Ashes first reign of terror. Obviously the sun is near setting, giving it that low, golden effect, but the air was really hazy and it appears to have softened the light. It all made for this really nice hazy pallet of colours in the image that we were all really happy with.
Sunset is really good for getting those golden lines around the edges of people.
Check out the band here:
http://www.myspace.com/oresteiaband
Welcome
As this is my first Tumblr entry I thought I’d talk a little about what it is that I do. My name is David Ransom, I’m a Southampton based Photographer, and I my work is mainly focused on Bands and Musicians Photography.
I work predominantly outside, when the weather lets me, with portable Flashes but I do also like to use studios when I can.
My equipment I use is:
Canon 1D mark II
Canon 24-85mm Lens
Canon 15mm Lens
Canon 55-200mm Lens
Vivitar 283 Flash gun
Metz 45 CT 4 Flash Gun
Metz 45 CT 3 Flash Gun
Elinchrom EL-Skyport Flash triggers
2x Bowens Prolite 60 Studio lights
Bownes Prolite 41A Studio Light
I have a BA(HONS) for The University of Wales, Newport where I graduated Documentary Photography in 2007. Whilst at Uni I worked on many different bodies of work and Documentaries that hopefully I will be talking about in detail in future blogs.
As you can see below, I will start off this blog by posting up some of my recent work so you can see what it is that I do, and as I post them I’ll talk a little about the shoot itself and what I did, why and how ect.
If you guys have anything you want to share with me, any questions you want to ask or are looking to get any work done, give me a shout at david.b.ransom@gmail.com
Take care
Ranny
