Oh by the way...

Random Vandals
Originally uploaded by Nostromoo

Don't you just love surprises? They are so, well unexpected.

Yesterday at work my Boss asked me if I'd shoot his son and friends for a magazine article being written which included them. I don't think it is going to be solely about them as such, but they are going to be mentioned in it. They have a band called Random Vandals, and evidentially their music had been discovered on MySpace and a couple of their tracks are going to be included on a compilation CD released by the magazine, so they need to supply a photograph to use with the article. I forget who they said the magazine was, the name meant nothing to me, but I'll try to find that out.

This was yesterday:

"Fred needs some pictures of his band. Can you take some?"

"Fine, when?"

"Uh, well they're just coming to the door now actually."

Okay, well I don't have my camera and personally I'd have preferred slightly more time to prepare. But okay. Let's try something.

Luckily (I suppose) I didn't have my camera and the memory card in the work camera failed and the shots I'd taken were all lost. Not that I minded too much and the work camera is about 50 years old. It takes acceptable images, but it's a frig to use. And it only shoots JPEG. And I'd hate to have had to rely solely on those images. Okay so they only want one image and it's probably be printed at an inch square. But I have my own standards.

So today I brought my D80 and a couple lenses and was all set to try again. There was some graffiti in the park which has caught their eye, so we headed over there and I had them line up and tried a few different poses.

I've never done an assignment photoshoot like this before, but it was quite good fun actually. I read somewhere, or maybe it was on a video, that when you shoot portraits of normal people they can be intimidated by a camera so to get a more natural look you need to get them used to the camera and try almost to get them to ignore it. So I tried to talk to them about the band, what their roles were, stuff like that. And keep shooting while you're talking. Seemed to work quite well. Although they probably thought I was some crazy out of touch old man. They even tried to explain to me what MySpace was. Okay, I'm not that old okay?

They've played a few local gigs but the venue that they play at most often has closed down and since they've recently had exams they haven't played a gig for a while. I think I may keep my eye out for them in the future though.

So this is my first proper assignment. It was fun and I don't think the results are bad. And I'd like to try it again.