Music Photography Blog

by Adam Elmakias

The Devil Wears Prada for HM Magazine

The Devil Wears Prada came after the book and before the film. Last week I drove down to their home town, Dayton Ohio, and stayed with them for a few days.

The first night we just kicked it, watched movies, and ordered pizza, really good pizza from Cousin Vinny’s.

Adam eating pizza

The next day we had to get to work. I met up with my assistants (Nick Brewer and Zac Fisher) for this shoot at a local coffee shop. We talked photo jargon for a few minutes before heading off for the shoot. For the record, these two saved my ass in this shoot, couldn’t thank them enough. My camera broke a few days before the shoot, so Nick let me borrow his. Somehow Zac managed to grab over 150 behind the scenes images, meter, and set up lights simultaneously – dude’s a machine.

Personally this shoot meant a lot to me because it was different than most. What set it apart was that I knew the guys personally, prior to photographing them. I have shot them and hung out with them on multiple occasions, and gotten a chance to get to know their personalities.

Basically, after you get all that technical junk figured out at a shoot, you are stuck with six tattooed guys standing in front of a big hunk-o-glass.

Challenge: capturing some kind of real/natural emotion in your photograph. People like to feel, people have emotions, we want to see emotions, it’s how we relate with eachother. I try my best to pack emotion into my shots – but there is no quick “just bump it up one stop” fix for this one.

Comfortable – everyone needs to feels comfortable. And by everyone I mean not just the guys you are shooting, but you as well. Ideally, you should be more comfortable than anyone else, I’m talking Tempur-Pedic mattress comfortable…. I’ll elaborate on this more some other time…back to the shoot.

The location for the shoot was at their practice space- a huge four story warehouse that they only practice in, a.k.a. a dream come true for me. I had never been there before, so everything related to this shoot had to be done on spot. Here is what I had to get done in 7 hours.

1. Cover story for HM magazine

2. Promotional images for band/label

3. Images of the band writing music in there practice space

4. Head-shots for some toys (don’t worry, I don’t get it either)

5. Promotional image of the guys in there practice space

We scoped out the locations, and set up the lights, shot the guys, and had a good time well doing it. I’ll have the final images from this shoot up once they are released.

You can see the shots of the guys writing/practicing on their MySpace page.


For now here are some behind the scenes images
All images taken by Zac Fisher.

Positioning…

After the shoot was over, basically just crashed on a couch and hung out with Taylor the next day. We hit up Steak ‘n Shake and talked photo jargon. Steak ‘n Shake is better than In-n-Out Burger, sorry California.