James Goldsworthy - Photography & Creative Retouching

26 09 10

Shot in the Dark with DJ/Producer Soul Intent

Nottingham based DJ/Producer Alex Judd AKA Soul Intent was looking for a set of promotional images to accompany his ever increasing release schedule with tunes already out on 31, Samurai, Blindside, Cylon, Creative Source and Vampire it was time to step up the PR game.

Being pretty underground until recently Alex had never had more than a few snaps done by friends or photographers at the gigs he’d played at, so we didn’t really have much of a visual style guide to work from. Increased interest from the likes of Radio1 (and 1Xtra) and a bunch of other underground labels meant that Al needed something a bit more special. We knew that sitting in the middle of a flower patch wouldn’t cut it and didn’t really want to shoot him behind the decks (usual boring DJ pose).

The music is dark and pretty unforgiving (in a good way!) so we knew we wanted something quite industrial and maybe something that would echo the feeling of his recent video, but at the same time something that showed a bit of Alex’s easy going and friendly personality…

Over the course of a few weeks via twitter I’d sent Alex links to some ‘found’ images and waited for feedback. Getting feedback this way is really useful as there was no pressure for Alex, if he didn’t like an image he’d say (and wouldn’t be offending my work).

We’d set the date and things looked good, right up until an hour before we’d planned to meet up, suddenly the heavens opened and it absolutely pissed down with the worst rain I’d witnessed since a visit to very wet, but lovely Poland.

We decided to go ahead and shoot anyway, just to see what we’d get. It was hell! Remote flashes getting soaked (useful to have doggy bags to cover them from the worst of it) and dripping lenses. Not cool. I felt like we’d already failed at this point.

In search of somewhere away from the rain we jumped on the platform of a nearby train station. To be honest, I thought without permission we’d be chucked out in minutes for being terror suspects or something – not so, the only people around were mopping the floor. The modern station roof was leaking like something that leaks, a lot.

The station provided some much needed cover but by this time it was proper dark. Shooting at ISO1250 isn’t ideal but we didn’t want to cause a lot of fuss by setting the flashes up, so we just went with slow shutters and steady hands or just lying on the floor for stability. When the situation isn’t ideal you just have to learn to deal with it, coming away with an image, any image was the goal at this point.

Once at home we popped the images in to Aperture just to see the damage of ISO1250, and with a few clicks and level adjustments we knew that we’d got something worth while.

A bit of time in post seems to have given some pretty useable results, they’ll never be stock quality, but I kind of think they fit the music, fast, dark, sinister, grainy.

Good stuff!

Find more of about Alex and his music on via his Facebook page, Soundcloud and MySpace (I didn’t think MySpace still existed!), or follow his every move – like a stalker @soulintentdnb

James Goldsworthy

Photography, Retouching

---

Commenting is closed for this article.