On the way to Orion Sound Studios to shoot avant-rock trio Zevious, I put together my vision for a portrait of them before the show. Orion is seemingly in the midst of industrial Baltimore, and there are tons of great grungy backgrounds to be found, but I opted for a simple loading dock doorway. I wanted to light the trio from underneath, but use a couple fill lights to avoid the really harsh, demonic shadows that usually result from that kind of uplighting. The above is what I came up with. In retrospect, my fill lights were turned way too low, but I’m still happy with the shot.

The lighting scheme was a White Lightning X1600 at half power popped off from (obviously) below the camera and on-axis, plus two speedlights in umbrellas at camera left and right. Those speedlights were set to 1/16th power, and despite being literally just outside the frame are contributing very little to the frame. That makes the shadows on the door nice and hard, but it also means that the shadows on the faces are a bit harsher than I wanted. Still, I think it works - not a look I would want to try for, you know, a singer-songwriter or an indie-pop band, but for these guys (or for any metal band really) it seems appropriate.

I also shot the show, but Orion’s light is dim, static and red, so they’re nothing special. I converted to black & white because of the monochrome reds. Here’s the set.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 11:23 am and is filed under Lighting & Studio, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.