any ideas for photo session with death metal band?

[Emil]

Hi,

a friend of mine have asked me to take some pictures of his band for promotional use. I am of course very honoured, and thrilled to have the chance to create some photographic art with these guys, but...

...I have no idea what to do!

If anyone here on the forum have any kind of crazy idea or inspiration for me, I would be very happy.

Location, mood, medium, look, technique, anything!!

The band is trio that plays death metal, guys in their twenties and all of them really nice and intelligent.

They told me they would like color pictures, in the woods, everyday clothes, but I think that would be a little too folk music-y, don't you?

What would you do? abandoned factory, wide-angle from floor level, subjects jumping off of step ladders? Tell them to relax or act tough or... dress them up as teletubbies?

As you may have guessed I have never done anything like this before, so I look forward to hearing all your crazy ideas

Thank you all

Emil

and please let me know if this is the wrong forum

[Rick A]

I think some garish colored lights and/or colored filters, spfx filters of any kind, nekkid chicks, and all the other trite bs you can think of.

Rick

[David A. Goldfarb]

Dress them in diapers and then use litho masking and stripping techniques to have them popping out of tulips or rolling around in a wicker basket of puppies--the full Anne Geddes treatment, analogue style of course.

[tiberiustibz]

Try some 3200 speed film (TMZ or Delta) or 800 speed color film (gold 800) shot under fluorescent lighting to give the green color in 35mm to get grain. Use a nifty 50. Sounds like much fun. For setting a nice old warehouse.

[ntenny]

I think some garish colored lights and/or colored filters, spfx filters of any kind, nekkid chicks, and all the other trite bs you can think of.

No, that's 80s hair metal and its successors, which is pretty much the cultural antithesis of death metal...

Unfortunately, since this is promo work, I think you're probably pretty constrained by the styles of the genre, which means a lot of leather, a lot of candid or faux-candid studio shots, and the obligatory group portrait of all of them looking disreputable and menacing. It's the commercial-photography problem---promos are the wrong place to be artistically adventurous...

But it might be fun just to mix in some high-contrast, gritty b&w street-esque material of the band members, for instance. The kind of stuff you'd see routinely for an East Coast hardcore band, and not so weird as to threaten the viewer's image of them as a metal band, but Something A Little Different nonetheless.

I would tend to avoid unexpected props...although the image just jumped into my head unbidden of the band gathered around a morgue table dissecting a giant Hello Kitty, and you may do with that thought what you like, I guess!

-NT

[Jeremy]

Listen to the music and journal ideas that come to you.

[Dave Pritchard]

My first suggestion is to watch "This is Spinal Tap" a couple of times. After that, just turn it up to 11.

[MattKing]

Listen to the music and journal ideas that come to you.

As Jeremy says.

Or if you prefer, something that you would consider to be the antithesis of:

http://adamanthenes.files.wordpress....ac-rumours.jpg



Matt

[David A. Goldfarb]

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There can really be no half measures with this sort of thing. It's either Anne Geddes, or dust their skin with white chalk, dress them in torn rags, and photograph them face down in a muddy ditch, like corpses in a mass grave.

[Michael W]

Here's hundreds of examples of what not to do ...