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<\/a>Blood Of An Outlaw (Scout Bar, Feb 2017)<\/p><\/div>\n
Whenever I see another photographer at a show, there is always a sense of competition.\u00a0 There is the obvious – will he or she get a better moment than I?\u00a0 Will this person be able to capture more quality images than I can?\u00a0 Why won’t they move from that spot because I would like some from that angle as well?\u00a0 But those are in the moment, when I’m trying to realize my own vision and there’s someone else honing in to try to satisfy theirs.\u00a0 After the set is over, that sense is gone and we move on to the next.\u00a0 But there is also that sense of competition when I’m looking at other concert work, and it is competition with myself.\u00a0 When I see high quality work, I ask how I can push myself to up my own output.\u00a0\u00a0After that first conversation with Maurice, the more banal sense of competition was quickly dispelled when he told me he was a bar photographer.\u00a0 His work inspired me to push myself even further, and was one of the prompts for my experimentation with color photography as discussed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Beyond Oblivion (BFE Rock Club, Nov 2016)<\/p><\/div>\n That’s not to say I was going to try to copy his style.\u00a0 Maurice’s style was pretty unique and incorporated things with which I don’t care to work.\u00a0 These things include HDR processing and highly saturated colors.\u00a0 I’ve experimented with those elements in the past and it just doesn’t work for me.\u00a0 When they’re done well, they can really look good, and Maurice certainly did these things very well.\u00a0 In the above photo of Beyond Oblivion, the selection here (because photography is a selective process) illustrates why he did this well.\u00a0 The saturation of the colors doesn’t assault one’s vision in the way many HDR processing saturations do.\u00a0 This is due to the fact that the image has an analogous color scheme (green – blue – blue violet – violet), which not only is pleasing to the eye, it creates harmony and serenity.\u00a0 The HDR processing created the contrasts necessary for this work.\u00a0 Overall, the\u00a0colors juxtapose nicely with the subject, which at the time was delivering an all out sonic assault.\u00a0 The venue’s logo, although partially obscured, does still have a prominent place, letting us know where there was taken.<\/p>\n Chaotic Justice (Fitzgerald’s, Sep 2016)<\/p><\/div>\n Here is another example of Maurice’s touch.\u00a0 Here he selected an image with complementary colors (a tinted blue and a shaded orange).\u00a0 The orange around the subjects stands out nicely against the blue light, framing the mostly black-clad performers.\u00a0 Again, the venue logo is obscured, but still occupies a prominent space in the frame so as to be unmistakable.<\/p>\n I did not talk about Maurice’s use of a super wide lens in this as it is not something on which I can comment in an intelligent manner.\u00a0 I’ve only used my super wide for landscape images, never for a concert performance.\u00a0 That\u00a0stems mostly from the fact that when one gets close, the edges\u00a0tend to distort.\u00a0 I’m a precisionist by nature when I\u00a0make images, and it’s hard for me to break that habit sometimes.\u00a0 I’ve seen some concert photographers use it at shows as it creates a chaotic effect, especially when the performers and crowd are both in the frame.\u00a0 Since Maurice was a bar photographer, I imagine creating that sense of chaos wasn’t his intent.\u00a0 Sadly, I can only speculate that since his goal was to capture 1 single image that encompassed the whole of the stage, he had no choice but to use this type of lens.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>