Gizzen Briggs primary schools concert

Yesterday presented a new challenge — how do you do a photo when the people who are meant to be in the photo aren't there?

I was meant to be doing a photo for a story in the Press & Journal about a concert featuring the Tain Royal Academy band Gizzen Briggs and lots of kids from primary schools around the region. The concert started at 7:30pm but the paper's deadline was 6pm so we arranged to set-up a photo with some of the primary school kids at the rehearsal in the afternoon. Only problem was that the primary school kids never actually came to the rehearsal.

We considered going to the local primary school to do the photo but on the way out of the door, complete with two Gizzen Briggers and a selection of violins to use as props, we realised that it was after 3pm so all the kids would have gone home.

Calling the paper with some no-can-do excuse wasn't an option so I decided to do the best I could, which was to look for photos that would be strong enough to stand on their own merit, even if they weren't exactly what we wanted, ie: none of the younger kids. I took photos during the rehearsal, then went through to another room with one of the violinists to do some posed shots with dramatic lighting.

I'd read about this technique the other day, called "skunk" lighting, so I thought I'd give that a go. I had no idea if it would work or not, but a few test shots looked promising so I stuck with it. By this point I was really just interested in getting a strong, eye-catching image that would jump off the page.

And to cut a long story short, or at least not so long, half an hour before deadline the paper had four rehearsal shots and four posed shots to choose from. Here's my favourite of the posed ones.

As is often the case the paper didn't use my first choice, but on this occasion I do really like the one they used. I haven't seen the paper myself so I don't know how they cropped it but this is the original frame:

Here are the other posed photos that I sent in:

And these are the other candid shots of the rehearsal:

One other idea I quickly tried was a silhouette. I've been told that the P&J editor isn't a fan of silhouettes but I thought it was worth spending a couple of minutes to see if I could get something really impressive. At the time I didn't like any of the results so I didn't bother sending them in, but now I do like this one frame: