Tegan's Fingers and the Art of Cropping

When taking pictures I usually try to get the shot I want without thinking about later adjustments or cropping. In the digital world we live in it's easy to take a photograph and possibly improve on it with Photoshop and other programs. But I live in the natural world too and I prefer to just leave things alone. Of course my Nikon D80 is a digital thing, but really all it does it capture light on a sensor according to the way I set the camera. I would prefer that it capture the light as naturally as possible. And this approach also includes the composition of the picture. This feels natural to me, whether it really is or not.

At the Tegan and Sara show I saw in Aspen in April, I wasn't able to get close enough to the stage to get the shots I really wanted. And there were a lot of people between me and the band. So I later spent some time cropping the photographs to get better views. This has helped me to see into the pictures more and I found some interesting details.

I cropped one to show this close-up of Tegan's guitar. It's not really a great picture -- it's a bit too blurry maybe -- but I like the way the guitar strings seem to vibrate under Tegan's fingers. This is something you really don't notice when looking at the entire photograph.

Here is the original photograph before cropping. You can click on either one to see a larger view.

Another crop from the same original is at Flickr here: Tegan Quin of Tegan and Sara on Flickr.

Recently I watched the Beatles 1965 movie Help, which has a number of scenes showing the Beatles miming to various songs. These sequences influenced later music promo films, especially MTV video clips. Some of them include close-up shots of the Beatles playing their instruments, showing fingers on strings. I guess this could be called "finger syncing." As a non-musician I've often been fascinated watching musicians play their instruments, especially with the way their fingers touch guitar strings or the keys of a saxophone or piano, or hold drumsticks. I tried to capture that idea here. In a natural yet digital kind of way...

Tegan and Sara - Belly Up, Aspen

Tegan and Sara played at Belly Up Aspen in Colorado on April 30, 2008. It was off-season in Aspen, the period between the end of the ski season and summer, so the town was quiet. But the club was filled with a boisterous crowd of Tegan and Sara fans, including many who had driven from Denver. I was able to take a few photos with my Nikon D80 from the crush of crazy fans on the dance floor in front of the stage. All four of these were cropped in camera. The camera was set on manual (f1.4, 1/60 shutter speed). I used a Nikkor 85mm f1.4 lens with no flash.

Sara Quin

Tegan and Sara

Tegan Quin

Sara Quin

In the eighties I photographed Wednesday Week at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, California. The two Belly Up clubs are separately owned by a pair of brothers.

More Tegan and Sara at: Tegan and Sara Photographs by Joe Beine

I Miss Contact Sheets

In 1986 I photographed one of my favorite bands, Wednesday Week, at a place called the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, California, which is on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. I prefer taking pictures of bands using whatever stage light there is in the club. Back then I had a Pentax ME Super and I didn't even own a flash unit for it. But the Belly Up Tavern lights just weren't quite right. Wednesday Week's lead singer, Kristi Callan, also had a Pentax camera, and loaned me her flash, which I used for these pictures. Kristi is currently in a cool band called Dime Box Band. That's when she's not pretending to be Robin Zander.

On this California trip I was staying in Hollywood with two friends, Curtis and Marsha Hawkins. Curtis worked for A&M Records and Marsha worked at a photo lab. She had the film processed for me and made the contact sheet you see here (click on it to see a larger version).


In 2001 I put some of my Wednesday Week photos online. I recently updated and moved the website. While looking through some old photos of the band I came upon this contact sheet and decided to scan it. It had to clean it up a bit, but I think the scan came out pretty well.

So I guess digital has almost wiped away our beloved analog contact sheets. I suppose you could make one with a graphics program, but that would be cheating. Another reason to pine for the days of film in this new photographic world of camera phones, too much Photoshop and HDR.

Photographing Drummers: Cymbals and Light

Drummers are the best musicians to photograph because they don't bounce around all over the place like singers and guitar players do (except maybe Keith Moon). And they're surrounded by all sorts of weird light enhancing stuff. You can get pictures with cool drumstick blurs and colored lights bouncing off cymbals.



This picture is of Wednesday Week drummer, Kelly Callan, who today runs a cool record label called Avebury Records. I took the picture with my trusty Pentax ME Super at Club Lingerie in Los Angeles in 1987. No flash was used, just whatever light was bouncing off the cymbals.

Motheater

Motheater live in world underneath Denver's normal music scene. They don't play in the known clubs or get written about in Westword. They don't know what a record label is for. Their shows almost seem like spontaneous happenings, spread by word of mouth and obscure Internet postings. I saw them last night at a tiny dark warehouse space on Brighton Boulevard, just beyond the railroad tracks and all those new overpriced lofts. Their music is a dark mass that moves with slow intensity. Look carefully beneath Denver's nightlife and you just might get to see them sometime.