Early last year, musician and friend Chris Spring asked me to photograph him for his new album, Victory Kisses. We headed out to the common land in Danbury near where Chris grew up to take some portraits and shots for his album cover.
We’d timed our shoot to catch the golden hour, but to begin with the lighting conditions were fairly challenging – strong light and deep shadows.
I’d brought two Light & Motion Stella 2000 lights with me – daylight temperature constant lights that give a really nice soft, gentle fill light.
I’ve always really enjoyed playing around with extending the composition beyond the extended. There a number of shots following where I’ve used multiple images stitched together to give a wider field of view. The shot below ended up being the album cover – and is comprised of seven individual frames to widen the field of view and bring more of the background into the image, whilst keeping a really natural field of view.
Chris had brought his guitar with him, of course – getting more than a few odd looks from dog walkers and cyclists alike.
It’s not all serious expressions with Chris – he does laugh too!
The next shot was a real challenge to stitch together afterwards. This is a handheld attempt at the Brenizer method, which I use fairly extensively as I really love the feel it lends to the resulting image. It’s comprised of 18 frames and was a reasonable challenge to stitch together in post – most of the composite images in this post were stitched using Lightroom’s in-built photomerge functions (it’s unexciting and inflexible but it does the job accurately). This image took a bit more work in Hugin to get looking right.
Danbury is covered in beautiful woodland and laced with pleasant paths and bridleways – the perfect spot to catch the evening’s last light.
You can (and should!) listen to and purchase Chris Spring’s ‘Victory Kisses’ on Bandcamp by clicking here or using the player below.
You may remember that I also took Chris’s portrait for his first album, Finished – you can find that post here.