Dark Daze photography blog

new work, new style, new outlook, and dare I say a new attitude….

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Your life is my Vanity Project
Georgie Hobday. Storm Agency Model Thursday 1st October 2009 4.45pm-5.45pm

I had a shoot at Garage Studios for Delarge new T’s just before I left for USA, just bashed through these with the ever gorgeous Sally Reynolds. Really simple set-up just a Bowens 500w on a beauty dish somewhere bashing over my shoulder, shot on the 5dMk11.

Think you can click the pic to see it larger.

Garage Studios have news of how you can win a print of this great image by Louie Banks.

The image is from GangUp Magazine, which Louie is one of the founders and has three editorials in the first issue. If you click to the left of the main image, you’ll see the gallery of Louie and Sam pop up.

In the meantime if you’d like to buy copy of GangUp then click the link. Its a beautiful 104 page magazine, packed full of some fantastic photography, and is priced at £12. If for some reason you cant order online then its available in numerous outlets including Borders, and RD Franks, Crane Kalman and more…. (we’ll update this with links asap).

Your life is my Vanity Project

Georgie Hobday. Storm Agency Model Thursday 24th September 2009 4.45pm-5.45pm

we had a promo shoot for Brighton’s Source Student Guide this week, I had only been back from USA for a day, a very long day at that… and as it was for the Student guide, editor Mr Kendall insisted it be shot on location somewhere landmark-esque in Brighton.

The band that he picked were This City who fortunately have a strong image and a good look. I cant begin to describe the torturous process of organising the shoot itself, and i have ranted and ranted before about bloody PR agents, but lets just say somewhere in the region of twenty emails pinged back and forth from the bands PR company, with some demands/requests that started at mildly amusing and ended up bordering on the deranged ended up in my inbox.

The band fortunately cant have been aware of any of this, as when I mailed Aaron he was incredibly helpful and willing to go with the ideas. It just goes to show that mgmt/pr and photographers should never mix, they clearly want to defend or protect their financial investment at every step, whilst I want to exploit every opportunity to make a great image. We are so far apart in what we both want to achieve that I have found if you can get direct contact with the band then its the only sensible road to go down. If you can show the idea they tend to be incredibly willing- often the most nightmare PR’s have turned out to be working for the most easy-going bands you’ll ever meet. But I aint complaining thats exactly their role, to protect and serve and to look after the labels interest, eg getting their money back…….

The idea I had was to shoot the band in the sea, but with just the usual ‘band line-up’ style, the twist being waist deep in water. Its pretty good weather in Brighton still now and amazingly the water was very warm- well compared to what i thought it would be… but thats cos I am a 9 Stone wuss and feel the cold on my almost visible bag-of-bones body.

What followed on the day of the shoot was a quick discussion on the beach as to what the band would wear, they needed only a little convincing to ‘man-up’ and go shirtless, as they have a whole set of killer tattoos between them. We kept two shirts on to add symmetry, and waded out into the sea. I dont know if the brighton sea is always this shallow but we waded out proper far before it even got slightly deep. Matt have a £500 light strapped to his arm, and a £450 battery pack strapped to his back as the waves crashed around us. My assistant Tash, cos shes so achingly hip, wore her lovely new dress in the sea too, and kinda ruined it. I was in my freshly ironed Ben Sherman shirt you know god is in the details and even when your crouched in the sea with water up to your chest you need to look fresh.

We were shooting polaroids, on a vintage land 340, into the sun with a bowens 500w head, blasting into the band. We chose Polaroid for the slight washed out look (no pun) and as the mag needed the images by the end of the day and we arent dumb enough to try with digital and there was no time to get film processed…..Unfortunately Pocket Wizards being more tempremental than Kanye when he’s done a big bag of afternoon gak with a brandy bottle chaser, they just didnt want to fire. Waiting in the sea, jumping waves and counting for the two minutes until you can peel apart a polaroid just to see it as silhouette is a real kick in your tiny shrivelled salty balls. This happened several times until we had to shoot away from the sun instead, shame really. But the band were brilliant, not complaining at all and trying not to get too soaked whilst i faffed around like a right tard.

Anyways here are a few of the outtakes, that kinda have a nice quality but aint covers for sure. They are sandy cos each time I shot one I had to wade a 100m to the shore and give it to the mag editor and then wade back out again to the band. Matt and tash seemed a bit despairing at how the equipment kept screwing up, but i guess Bowens wasnt built for the sea, everything got soaked, all our clothes, lights, cables, tash dropped polaroids into the sea like it was a new game, and even lobbed away a decent reflector which may have bobbed up on the beach by now, and is yours if you find it. After 6 shots we got the one we needed, and the whole thing probably took 15 minutes but under that pressure it felt like an age.

I gotta say though it was one of the most fun shoots I have had in years, and just goes to show that with the right subjects, a dope as fuck band like this, and a bit of willing even i can overcome my own ineptitude to pull out a decent image or two.

This will be out in Oct.

Thats genuine sand on the scans by the way…..

I had a shoot a while back with DD favourite SJ. You can read more about the shoot here…..

or you can just stare at how amazing this girl is in the pics below. The clothes are from MIshka, NYC although as you all may know by now SJ has her own site and designs as well- which I am sure I’ll get a crack at shooting one day. The site takes a bit to load but give it time. Hot damn i love this lady…. (but so does sally so its all good) Oh and there will be more to come tomo- but its been a busy day at GS towers.

[caption id="attachment_544" align="alignnone" width="433" caption="SJ in Mishka and a Gold Chain for DarkDaze"][/caption][caption id="attachment_546" align="alignnone" width="433" caption="SJ in Mishka for DarkDaze"][/caption]

DD x

I am selling one of my own, remastered prints. I never sell my own stuff, every other print is sold in the one gallery that represents me, and none of it is limited edition. I have a very special DD image, which i worked on for a friends birthday. I am releasing 9 other prints of this image and then thats the end of the print run. Its a blind auction, but as a guide a non-limited print from the Gallery of the shot before this one is £100. mail me info@darkdaze.org with yr offer, if its in the top nine i will contact you with details of p+p etc.

The print is Sally in Cali, at a Motel one sunny morning. Its approx 38×30 cm archival print, which I will print myself. It was shot on my Bronica ETRSi when on a cali tour of cheap motels and dive bars.
you can see it here (its not very safe for work)
Black and White doorway shot

On another note i have a few places left on my Creative Photography and Visual Theory course you can find all the details here, the first group went so well they want to come back again- so dont miss out. There is a lot to learn here, plus some great exercises and helpful info, good places to look for inspiration etc. If you love photography, or if you feel jaded about your images then sign up to this. But click the link to see what we offer.
Creative Course info

So this is kinda how it came about… if yr interested.

I have had the desperate desire to shoot rooms in the studio for ages, but due to many reasons its been really difficult to sort out, especially as we have so many workshops and classes in the Garage Studios space- meaning anything we did had to be set up, built lit and shot in less than 48hrs, with everything returned back to a plain white, painted studio by the end of it. Running a commercial business and trying to do creative shoots is a tricky juggling act. So I had an idea of an image i wanted to shoot, and fortunately Matt and Adam are happy to indulge my ideas sometimes, we had 2 empty days in the diary in the week ahead, so they said they’d be happy to throw some time into this one- as long as i could get the whole thing locked first.

I have always been a bit obsessed with the horror of religious painting, and had spent a fair bit of time cradling my head in my hands at Caravaggio paintings, I have linked some detail images below…. if i could control lighting like that then I’d die a happy man, instead of one probably wracked with remorse and regret.

I have also got a bit consumed by the narcissism of what we’re all doing now, the blogs, the twitter, the constant bleating just to hear our own words, over and over- and yes sure I realise that this post here is contributing to that thing that drives me all nuts. Its the self absorption I guess…. and that Narcissism appeared in another bloody Caravaggio image…..

I didnt know what the image was at this point- except it would be a room split down an axis, in one room SJ, beating up a guy, as we are both in thrall still with LaChappelle and I had promised her I would shoot something with this as its starting point, but completely try and bring something new to content.

Now as much as we both wanted to shoot something hot and rowdy, I didnt wanna rip this, but add something DD to it, you know, Hot Girls, comics, horror, the whole shebang, plus I had a magazine offering a double page spread and knew this could be one room- with some horror in the other. The story would be maybe a girl banging on the dividing wall, but with a hanging body next to her, oblivious to its prescence- but after a while it seemed a bit obvious- and angsty, and I wanted to use more models anyway, and fill the weird double page crop (its a square page on the mag) with a image that had an obvious flow, but a really rigid structure. I never really like to allow my models to move on shoots like this- you gotta keep it tight or it becomes something completely different.

So after a few false starts – and even the specific model dropping out- and a lot of coffee, no food, a few beers, some arguments with myself and getting to the point that I wanted to stab my fucking eyes out after sitting on my own in the studio for far too many bloody hours, and feeling kinda drunk off of two beers, i came up with a half decent sketch. Going over the idea for about 4 hours one night with Emma of Ophelia Fancy, (who i could never had carried this through without) we got the story right, an epic battle between two forces, the Blonde tattooed SJ and the Brunette Tattooed Toots Von Fury- two amazing girls who couldnt be more different but equally enigmatic when you meet them.

I mapped out all the positions by sticking the camera on self timer and throwing myself around the studio, with a masking tape set of walls stuck to the floor- but nothing in ‘there-is-no-God’s’ sweet earth would bring me to show those to you.

So here is the exact sketch that came out after the cawling on the floor, by the early hours of Saturday night (we were shooting on Tuesday), as you can tell I caint draw too right… but its just a plan innit….

complete with colour scheme (heavily influenced by the amazing Dean Stockwell “In Dreams”scene in Blue Velvet- which if you havent seen just stop reading this indulgent bollocks and go watch now. You may never feel the same again. I wavered on the carpet ish for a while, thinking it needed to be darker (but as it happened matt came back from a car park salvaging mission with two choices including a perfect Green.)

The thing I am dead pleased about is really the only thing that changed from sketch to final image was elin’s position, she was gonna be stabbed in the side and slumped down but it just wouldnt have worked- leaving a big space in the middle of the image, so we decided to lean her on the mini bar, and a little bit of tweaking for the others. And look at how good a job Matt and Laurie made bringing the sketch into something 100% real, and to identical scale, thats skills kids, skills….

So thats were I got to by Sunday night, after some non-stop obsessing and handed the ideas to Matt for Set Construction, and Emma and Stevi for the styling, whilst I had to try and cast the remaining models, with 24 hours to go…….

and i havent even begun to mention the shoot itself yet- the team, the time it took, oh theres good stuff to come for sure…. with photos too (and bonus they aint mine).

More will be on www.garage-studios.co.uk/blog tomo …. whoop

Important news below…..

here it is in some not eye bleedingly small glory… and less yellow than flickr makes it…

To see a set-build and read some more about this please follow the link to Garage Studios Blog

If you like this we offer courses in Studio Lighting and Creative Photography, but are also thinking of a new course that may involve a small group of students working on a project, with a set build, and models etc. Its the chance to be part of a creative team, work on all aspects of the shoot from the inital idea, to the set build, the shoot itself and the final image. Kind of a bespoke course, if you are interested then please mail info@garage-studios.co.uk