Last week I put up some pictures of the band Subtheme. The rehearsal shots were taken in Ant Dickinson’s Resolution Studio.
Ant has spent the best part of the last year putting this space together and now that it’s finished he asked me to come and take some pictures.
This building holds a special place in my heart. Ant and I spent countless hours in these rooms recording foley sound and mixing the final audio for my feature film Dark Waters. Over the months I spent in the studio, it was really interesting seeing the space become more complete on each visit, and now it’s finished I jumped at the chance to take the photographs.
For the images of the band, I was really throwing a lot of light around, burning out the background so I could focus on the people. For these images we needed to be a lot more precise and technical, we wanted to show off the space in it’s best light. In most of these images I’m using three lights; one behind the camera, bounced either off a ceiling or wall – this provides a good base level of light – getting the exposure up to a workable level and letting us see all the details of the room; to provide the interest and a bit of drama I use one very directional light, this casts some interesting shadows about and draws the focus to the part of the image we want the viewer to be looking at; the third light is usually a troubleshooter – there is almost always one tricky area of a room that simply refuses to be lit, that’s why it’s always useful to pack more lights than you think you’ll need – in these images, that third light is under the desk and behind the drumkit – providing a little bit of lift to the dark areas.
