A heap of photos from the past

Hi all,

I've half-forced myself to start a Tumblr blog in order to go through my archives to find photos that I sort of like. I thought I'd share my findings so far. Hope you like them. The archive contains both live photos and backstage & off-stage moments from my music photographing 'career'.

Enter the gallery here

Teaser:

How are we to comment if you do not post them here... I never understood that.

The one photo posted is too cluttered, the subject of the photo was the third thing my eye went to. My eyes went to the #1 towels (the heaping pile of laundry is much larger than the subject itself), #2 lights, and then #3 the person. The lines on the floor and the object going through her right arm in the background are also detracting form the image.... It just doesn't work for me.

moemoe6434 wrote in post #12425430
How are we to comment if you do not post them here... I never understood that.

I'm not looking for feedback on specific photos (thanks for yours, though). Just wanted to share.

kmb wrote in post #12425061
Hope you like them.

Very much, at least most of them

Kalle. be careful about Tumblr's Terms of Service...

i'll check more of these out later, but i always enjoy your work and of the 3-4 pages i've looked at, i agree w/ René

KMB, someone here recommended I check out your site after I said I was getting burnt-out on concert photography and needed some inspiration. I was blown away by your stuff. Your style reminds me a lot of Anton Corbijn. Very intimate.

Anyway, just wanted to say I'm a big fan and I always look forward to your facebook updates

Thanks for the encouragement & feedback!

narlus wrote in post #12427679
Kalle. be careful about Tumblr's Terms of Service...

Thanks, I'll look into that...

Norkusa wrote in post #12430783
KMB, someone here recommended I check out your site after I said I was getting burnt-out on concert photography and needed some inspiration. I was blown away by your stuff. Your style reminds me a lot of Anton Corbijn. Very intimate.

Thanks, this kind of feedback is very motivating!

About inspiration for concert / rock photography, I personally recommend looking for it outside of the "bubble" of rock photography. If we think of documentary photography as a whole (encompassing rock photography and all of the other areas, like street photography, war photography etc), the vast majority of photographers work outside rock photography, and because of this, if we were to make a top 100 list of documentary photographers, it would not include many "rock photographers". But the building blocks of great documentary photographs remain the same, independent of the subject matter: visual or content-provided tension, capturing "the moment", humor that the photographer can find in mundane things and present through selecting what is inside the frame... etc.

One of my current favorite photo books is Elliott Erwitt's "Museum Watching". A book entirely about museums, their workers and people visiting the museums. It's almost exactly like concert photography: the statues or paintings are the musicians, the audience is the audience, and the museum is the venue. Except Erwitt does not concentrate on photographing only the statues and the paintings. Here's one of my favorites from the book.

I think that getting burnt-out / bored with my own photography is about the best thing that happened to me as it forced me to rethink the semi-mechanical approach I had to it before.

Some personal thoughts that work for me:
- Focus on content.
- Discard photos that show nothing new (preferrably don't take those photos). Be proud of photos that exhibit your personal vision.
- Be happy about getting 1 exhibition-worthy photo per 10 gigs photographed, not 10 publishable pictures per 1 gig (of course, if you're doing magazine assignments, this is a bit harder as you need the publishable photos as well from each gig).
- Favor opportunities to photograph full shows at small clubs over 1-3 song rule arena gigs (Or maybe it is just my personal inability to create anything that interests me out of the big international acts).
- Don't be a "rock photographer". Be a photographer who concentrates on photographing rock concerts. This frees you to explore the concert or whatever situation you are in without borders.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed above are my personal thoughts. I don't claim that the ideas presented will work for everybody and certainly I don't think that everybody should approach photography the same way. Just my 2 cents.

Thanks a lot for the tips, Kalle. Some very good advice there. The great thing about your photos is that I have no idea who most of these bands are but that doesn't really matter. They're more like portraits of people at work or having fun. The name of the band or location is irrelevant.

Some of my favorite photos of yours look like they were taken back stage or not even during a concert at all. How do you get such great access to these bands? Are they friends of yours? And how do you get that awesome contrast in your photos? I've been messing around with silverfx lately trying to achieve a similar look but they don't look nearly as good as yours.

Norkusa wrote in post #12437740
Some of my favorite photos of yours look like they were taken back stage or not even during a concert at all. How do you get such great access to these bands? Are they friends of yours?

Well, I blame Finland and the relaxed culture here regarding our top musicians. Ville Valo (of HIM) can be regularly seen at the Tavastia club/bar in Helsinki (or so I've heard), except when there's an international metal event there, since the fan culture of the international fans is such that he is bothered constantly (or so I've heard).

Also, the "biggest" bands who aren't of international fame (for example, because of lyrics being in Finnish) are quite small on the international scale.

Thirdly, some of the bands seem to appreciate my work and want me to be there to take photos of them.

After the publication of my first book of the Finnish band PMMP (who are basically as big as a band gets without singing in English), things have gotten easier as I have something I can show/give to people, and I have proof that I can cope with the downsides of touring.

I'm sure almost anybody with a half decent portfolio can get to tour with a band. As long as don't expect that band to be 'big'. Bands playing marginal music can be great since they can have heaps of talent and passion - it's the genre they play that keeps them unknown as far as the general public is concerned.

Norkusa wrote in post #12437740
And how do you get that awesome contrast in your photos? I've been messing around with silverfx lately trying to achieve a similar look but they don't look nearly as good as yours.

Nowadays 99% of the digital photos I do go through Lightroom 3 post processing only (except when I prepare them for printing, but that's just technicalities such as converting to a different profile etc). I guess the
secret is the usage of the adjustment brush.

The thing is, that when you add massive contrast to an image, the dark parts may go pitch-black and the light parts may burn out. So what you do is use adjustment brush - typically a large-ish size with a lot of feather, and add exposure to the dark areas and reduce exposure from the light areas. Sometimes you may want things to be pitch-black (at least if you're an Anton Corbijn fan), but typically you want most of the picture area to be on the steepest part of the tone curve, not in the extremes (as a side note, if you're using LR, you'll have to imagine the "sum tone curve", as brightness and contrast adjustments are essentially tone curve adjustments that you don't see).

To put this in another way, try to adjust the contrast and lightness/exposure by looking at your main subject only (maybe his/her face only) and ignoring the rest of the image. As you adjust contrast and lightness/exposure, the rest of the image may go all weird but the part you're concentrating on looks good. So you essentially leave the global adjustments as they are and try to get the "weird parts" under control with the adjustment brush. It's surprising how sloppy you can be when using the adjustment brush as long as it is big enough and there's enough feather. Just go wild with it and try things. Also, if you have the opportunity (and haven't done so yet), try to get to see somebody experienced doing "real" burning-and-dodging while they're creating a print of a film image in the traditional way in a darkroom.

I may be completely off by giving this long-winded explanation about the wonders of the adjustment brush, but that's what I'd imagine to be the missing link...

It's something that I've learned by doing, so it's a bit hard to write exactly what I do. It also depends on the picture at hand.