Garage Band Retro

The opium/neon haze around the intact guitar fret and hand works well, making the viewer swirl around a bit before alighting on the center. The red is electric, pairing well with the turquoise dribbling down the sides.

Three very different pictures and each worth pausing a bit for a moment's appreciation. Each brings a smile. Can't ask for much more.

and pleasant. Well done.

--MAA

psy⋅che⋅del⋅ic . . .

I like the crowded feel of the garage/small nightclub with the mottled colors of a cool vibe going on. Very nice. Is this a zoom out while the shutter is open?

 

Kirk

Thanks guys for sharing your impressions.

 

I'm happy if this came across as fun since it was a gas to shoot. This is literally a garage band as the photo was taken in a friends garage. None of these guys gave up their day jobs but once or twice a year my friend throws a big bash at his house and sets up the garage so that anyone who comes by can get up and play.

 

The lighting was worse than bad and I had to raise the ISO to places it have never been before. This shot was illuminated by a red spot light and a lava lamp, how Psychedelic is that ?

You can just make out the lava lamp shape against the red in the background.

 

Kirk, I think you may be correct about the zoom as that was one of the things I was doing in my efforts to get a retro feel for this. EXIF data does not register whether or not the lens is zoomed during exposure however I do recall zooming on the hands of various players. The in focus hand in the background belonged to the bass player and the very blurry , noisy blob in the right side of the frame foreground was the guitarists hand and arm.

 

The whole night was a riot to shoot and some of the music wasn't too bad if you like listening to rather loosely played covers of King Crimson, Black Sabbath, Hendrix and the likes.

It is a very nice music composition.The hand and tool in the blurred surrounding are enough to tell all the story. The red color to the upper triangled direction are like the music sound dispersing in the space of the place. The black silhouette of the musicain connected to the partly dark surrounding, the feeling of lights here and there are creating the atmospher .Beautifuly executed.

 

Finishing writing I sow your explanation, and it looks we wrote again simoultaneously...;-)) with all your difficulties it is a photo fits very much to my imagination of the scene.

On second thought though, if you were zooming as the shutter was open, the guitar hand would be stretched to. Never did fool with that technique so can't say from experience. However you got it, I like it. That does sound like a good time.

 

Kirk

Pnina;

 

Thanks for that terrific description Of how this photo comes across to you. I'm glad that even with so few points of reference it has an atmosphere and speaks of music.

 

Kirk;

 

I have fooled around with zooming during slow shutter but not very often. I have noted that the zoom effect radiates from the center of the image and the object dead center can be completely unaffected depending on the speed of the zooming and the shutter speed.

I find this to be more about the musical experience than musical per se. It has an environmental, even in a way an architectural feel to it. The music seems to me to be coming out of the surroundings, a wall, a doorway, lights, darkness, emptiness, the swirl of the club. The black shape on the upper left could be the curve of a piano with its top open, the small relief brick (?) just under the guitar player's hand could be a portrait of Gordon, or any man, or not. I have a sense of location viewing this even stronger than my hearing of the music. Clubs can be like that. Yet the hand and neck of the guitar make their musical entry nicely, but with a distinct sense of scale within a much larger emotional frame.

The hand being so dead center goes along with it being the least blurred element and actually grounds the energy of the movement. Even though the swirling movements of the lights and objects is captured, they are big blocks of color and shape, not the usual smaller darts and bolts of musical abstraction. That does make a difference. I feel less individual notes in the composition than I do larger themes and spatial entities. The music comes to me a bit in the clarity of the strings and hand, again almost as if it struggles to emerge from the "place."

Fred;

 

Thanks for sharing your interesting take on this scene. The way you relate the nature of the the compositional structures to the implied sounds of the music is interesting to consider. I had not made that connection myself yet it is apt. I can attest to the music having been chunky and dense, more like slabs of sound than arrangements of notes. The music was as murky as my photo, while containing occasional flashes of clarity.

 

I wanted the story to unfold in broad and indistinct strokes emanating from the hand on the bass guitar. A part of what I was working towards when shooting was the sense of containment and the cramped quarters I had felt at the time. Using narrow dof and boxing in one small element of the scene seemed to convey that closeness.

 

Having been there, I know what all of the individual blurred elements surround the center were. I like that those elements ended up implying any number of possible objects. The white design which looks like a portrait is the distorted logo on the front of an amplifier. The bass guitarist is framed between two people. The singer on the left of the frame and on the right you are looking at the lead guitarists arm, the amorphous blob on the end being his hand in motion. So for me this is a photo of three friends playing music in garage at a house party. The fact that only part of that reality is apparent with the remainder wide open to interpretation is what attracted me to this result initially.