Or, I Went to Shoot Models and Shot More Musicians
Posted June 30, 2023
Last Saturday evening was supposed to be the return of StreetMeet after a year-long hiatus. But it never happened, and instead I wound up in the middle of another event on Pier 62, and photographed a couple of high-school-age rock bands who were taking their turn on the big outdoor stage.
It was a shame about StreetMeet, because over the last few years it’s been my one connection to actual portrait photography. Of course it was always a completely informal affair: an Instagram flash-meetup group for aspiring models and portrait photographers, usually once a month, where we’d get a loaction and time on our phone and people would just show up, mingle, pose and shoot. It’s been a sad year without it.
So Saturday the grand return was set for Pier 62, clearly in ignorance that another event was in possession, but it’s a big pier and there was plenty of space, so myself and a couple of other photographers, StreetMeet veterans whom I recognized, stood or walked around and waited – but it never materialized.
(Later it developed that there were traffic issues and I think they reset to a different pier, but that was hours after I’d given up and gone home.)
In the meantime, though – here we photographers were, and here an event was, so we photographed that! And it proved to be quite a worthwhile scene to shoot.
Like I say, it was a rock concert for high-school-age bands, but when I say “bands” I could easily say orchestras, for at any given time there were a dozen or more young musicians on stage, including multiple singers and guitarists and a full-fledged horn section, and they were playing high-energy covers and knocking them out of the park. When the horn players led a perfect intro to No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs” I blinked in amazement, and when the female vocalists followed with equal mimicry I was hooked.
What I was seeing, it turned out, were musicians from Caleb Chapman’s Soundhouse, a youth music-training program. Roughly speaking they comprised two bands (“Lo-Fi Riot” and “Max Headroom”), each with a dozen or so members, but players seemed to flow smoothly at different times on and off stage, with nary a pause between songs or a drop in tightness, while others, like the great drummer, remained constant throughout. The kids not only had chops through the roof but were groomed to a “look” as marketable as the old covers they were given to play.
In other words these weren’t “bands,” exactly, in the genuine sense. But by the same token they were that much more fun to photograph. I only wish I’d done a better job.
Photographywise I had two issues.
The first was the same old Pier 62 issue: performers on that damn stage are backdropped by the sheer wall of blazing light that’s the sun on the harbor; it casts everyone into silhouette, and rescuing the photos later in post was an exercise in pulling shadows about as far as they could stand. The second was that planted on the pier in front of the stage was a thick arc of audience seated in white plastic chairs, which meant either shooting from back behind them with my telephoto, or going around to the sides (where the poles of the stage canopy interfered), or, finally, summoning the courage to march into the open space at the foot of the stage, kneel down, and shoot up for closeups.
I did a little of all three, with the result that I came away with a lot of musician closeups, but no wide-angle shots that really captured the energy of the united performance.
There were, nevertheless, some quite photogenic targets for musician closeups, in Caleb Chapman’s bands.
