Opening the show

A photographer will, I believe, naturally develop a style of photography over time that tends to reappear in most or all of his or her images.  The ideal scenario is that the photographer becomes known for their style and that someone can look at an image and identify the photographer from it.  In reality that will be an aspiration for all but a select few, but we can live in hope.  From time to time though, by accident or design, it’s good to break out of the mould and create images that look a little different to what we normally produce.

In terms of my style, I’m still at the point where I (often subconciously) put a lot of emphasis on the technical aspects of an image.  I like to get histograms that look “correct”, I like to avoid blown out highlights or areas of pure black, I like to create compositions within the rules.  That’s not to say every image I create, or indeed every image that I post here, fulfills those criteria.  Nor does it suggest that I don’t try to be creative – quite the opposite in fact – but certainly having taken an image, my approach to how I treat it tends to start with sorting out the technical aspects of it.  Often the creative aspects have to be resolved in-camera at the time of taking the image.

Another aspect of my style is that I tend to create colour images far more than I create monochrome ones.  If the images posted here are representative of this, I can conclude that over 80% of the time I’ll opt for a colour image over a monochrome one.  This will change where I’m shooting something like a wedding, but for images that are for my own use, I naturally favour colour.

So the photograph above is a bit of a departure for me.  It was taken last month in the Grand Hotel in Malahide as Siren – my sister’s electric string quartet – took to the floor for a 15 minute session at a corporate gig.  It’s a departure because I never attempted, either when capturing it or processing it, to get it technically “correct” and I suppose also because it is in monochrome.  It’s darker in tone than what I tend to create, but I liked it from the moment I saw it.

I deliberately underexposed it by shooting into the spotlight, and controlling the exposure so as to keep just enough detail to highlight Llinos, Jo, Úna and Kotono, but push everything else to black.  What prompted me to try at least one shot like this was actually the dancefloor on which the girls were standing – it was quite cool as dancefloors go, with embedded LED lights that I knew would not reproduce well in an exposure based on the ambient light in the room.

Given that the entire gig was so short, at 15 minutes, I didn’t really get a chance to do more shots like this, but then again, I knew from the back of the camera I had a shot I could work with the create the image I had in mind, which was pretty close to what you see above.