Clive Barnes – Promo Shoot

I met up with Clive Barnes (legend!) for a photo-shoot yesterday morning, with Clive looking for promo-shots to use for upcoming tours and me only too happy to get him in front of my lens.

As we’ve said on the Sound System Podcast, myself and Ken will be providing some P.R services for Clive’s upcoming tour with Australian legend Jeff Lang this July. We had initially planned to do the shoot last weekend but with the unpredictable weather we had to post-pone, giving me time to do some research and get some practice before the shoot.

Over the past few months I’ve been looking at a lot of different music promo photographers, with so many different styles and techniques to try. One of the great things about this shoot was Clive knew exactly the kind of shots he wanted and was able to give me plenty of suggestions on work to check out. The only problem being that he wanted some black and white promo shots, which firstly I’ve never done and secondly I tend to stay clear of black and white when I can.

It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I think it’s very hard to do well. A lot of photographers tend to simply shoot normally and then change an average shot to black and white to make it look a little better. It’s more attractive to the eye. But it just isn’t the same as shooting with the intention of getting good contrast black and white shots!?

My next problem being that we’d be doing the promo-shoot outside in natural lighting, yet another thing I hadn’t done. So with the shoot being delayed a week, it gave me time to get in some practice. Taking short breaks from working on my thesis, I played around with shots using natural light coming in a window to get a feel for how to go about the shots.

Yesterday morning, Clive picked me up and we drove to a quiet railway crossing just outside Bennettsbridge, hoping the rain would hold off long enough. The sky was clear and perfect for what I wanted to do; getting it to completely white out. We were both kind of surprised by how quickly we got shots we were happy with. Shooting on a 50mm (cheers Ken. I’ll give it back…someday), using the small depth of field to throw focus on the background and using the train tracks for forced perspective, I got plenty of shots. Then I just removed the colour and adjusted the levels slightly for my first series of black and white music promo shots.

It wasn’t long before we were back in the car and on our way to Woodstock in Ennistioge, for the second part of the shoot. I won’t go into the exact details of conversations in the car but I have to say that Clive has some of the coolest and funniest stories I’ve ever heard and upon arriving in Woodstock I discovered that he also has a surprising amount of knowledge about trees!?

Our first stop was in an avenue of huge monkey puzzle trees (Clive told me!), with the idea to use the background like the train tracks for forced perspective. But the sun had gone on us and the trees were just too big to get the shots we wanted. So we moved on to a small wooden cabin type structure, just in time for the sun to reappear and provide great natural light beams and awesome colours in the background. Clive took out his guitar and did his thing whilst I got out the camera and did mine.

Waiting for bursts of sunlight through the clouds I once again got shots we were happy with, very quickly. Straight away dismissing the idea of black & white for these ones, meaning I could try out another completely different style of promo shots. I could have played around for hours but the clouds said no. We made our way home and just as I got in the door, the rain came down in buckets.

I ‘d really love feedback on these new shots (comments, criticism, anything) and you can check out the full series of shots here on Clive Barnes MySpace Profile, where you will also see a long list of gig dates all over the country. I’ve seen him live three times so far and he’s awesome. I’m looking forward to seeing him again over the summer and hopefully getting him in front of my lens again.