When I get to know producers and DJs properly I try not to be over-the-top about their music and things – there’s nothing worse than an overinflated ego! I’m lucky to get to be a photographer for most of the bigger producers in Manchester these days and tend not to have that problem – apart from with two.
Synkro & Indigo have been making amazing music for quite some time now, and are rightfully respected worldwide for doing so. The music they produce, both together and seperately, has a depth and often beauty I’ve struggled to find in other places. Even if I didn’t know them I’d count them as two of my favourite musicians on the planet. Just listen to this…
Gushing aside, I had a recent email from the editor of the Manchester magazine ‘Now Then…’ whom I’ve done a bit of work for. They were commissioning an interview with Akkord, a side-project of the aforementioned duet. As he knew I was a fan, but was unaware I knew them, he asked if I wanted to do it. I couldn’t really turn that down!
So with the questions drafted I went over to Liam Indigo’s place and we all had a chat about the Akkord project which included a superb debut album on Houndstooth. I won’t go into further depth about the interview – you can read it here on page 40…
As my first love is photography, I couldn’t do an interview with an artist and not include some images for the magazine to use and I went into the interview with the idea already in mind. I had been inspired by a blog post featuring some amazing portraits which were double-exposed, or layered up with different textures. In this sense the subject can become almost anonymous beneath the additional layers. The Akkord project started out in anonymity and both Liam and Joe are inspired by the natural world and I thought it would be cool to mash all these ideas together.
I took a couple of relatively simple shots: one of the duo on a plain background and another spontaneously of them messing around with a couple of mini-synths in the studio. When I got home I did some long exposure shots of the trees, leaves and natural textures I could find in my garden, assisted by the neighbour’s floodlight which gave an unusual lighting to it all. After processing the shots in Lightroom as usual, I got stuck into Photoshop. Once in there it was a case of playing with the layers and using different layer-blending modes. Some layers were masked for the subject, some were masked for the background and others still covered the entire image. It took a bit of playing around to get the final images that I was happy with, but it was fun trying out a new technique and added another string to my bow for future work.