Hiding the Stars

The album Alchemist by the groovy, electronic-jazz group Project drops June 16th.

A good friend of a good friend contacted me asking to collaborate with other photographers to create artwork for his forthcoming album. A collection of photographers were asked to pick a song from the yet-to-be-released album and make a picture to illustrate the track. This was by far the most challenging thing I have done in a long time. I initially listened to two tracks (loud and with my eyes closed) and immediately saw a running narrative that went along with each song; almost like a music video or a scene from a movie with the soundtrack running. I had a very hard time distilling the moving narrative I felt into a single frame (I also only had 24 hours to pull it off which didn’t make it any easier). I came up with a concept for each song only to find out that art had already been produced for both them. One song was left, Hiding the Stars, the first ’single’.

Give the track Hiding the Stars a listen and see if you see what I saw. (This version is slightly different than what I heard)

I followed the same steps, listening to it loud, over and over. I realized that the scenes I was seeing matched up with what I saw in the other songs. Almost like the album was a ‘jazz opera’. I saw the same characters in all the songs. Hiding the Stars has a heart beat and a sense of motion. It was anxious and emotional. I saw the morning rat race in super fast forward with sections in extreme slow motion, almost as if individuals were trying to break free of it all. I saw a guy who doesn’t have a place in established society and doesn’t know what to do about it. Is he upset because he cannot fit in with the rest of society? Does he want to fit in? Has he broken free and can’t handle what is on the other side? Is he overcome with loneliness because he can’t find anyone else like him? Who knows, but this is what I had to think about when conceptualizing the idea.

The technical challenges were being able to create the image that I saw in my head in a short period of time with limited resources. This image was made near midnight after a few hours of walking through the Byward Market looking for inspiration. I used by 50mm f1.4 at f2 with a small softbox overhead. Originally I saw this in black and white, but I ended up desaturating the image by 50% instead. I also used the High Pass filter in Adobe Photoshop for the first time; I set it to a reasonably high number, dropped the opacity and fiddled around with the blending options until I found something I liked. Check out this months issue of Digital Photo Pro for a nice article on using the High Pass filter.

This was a big departure from the way I usually work. This was the first time that I wished I didn’t have the constraints of a still frame camera. I wanted the RED camera. I am inspired by the work that Vincent Laforet is doing with it and the way Esquire magazine used it to shoot Megan Fox for the cover. Maybe this is the next step.

 

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