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