After a really busy week I was thrilled when I found the new album by Mabon in the mail today. Their new record is entitled “Stampede of the Damned” and I was fortunate enough to shoot the cover for it:
Album cover for "Stampede of the Damned" by "Mabon"
To create the cover image we shot all of the band members individually against a black background in my studio. Each exposure lasted 6 seconds, while I had the modeling lights of my Elinchrom flash heads running. Within those 6 seconds of exposure I asked the band to move around, kicking and screaming as if in agony. During the long exposure I manually triggered the strobes to freeze a few moments in time, while the rest of the movement was smeared due to the long exposure. The resulting images looked something like this:
6 second exposure with multiple strobe bursts
6 Second Exposure with multiple strobe bursts
Multiple frames likes these of all of the band members where then composed into one burst of humanoid emotion… at least that’s what it felt like while I composed the final result.
The final result after compositing the individual shots
Once again this project proved to me that working with musicians is one of the most rewarding things to do as a visual creative. Mabon’s new record is available now through their website!
I finally got around to edit some of the behind the scenes footage from the shoot for LIEBE (Love), which was one of three principal images of my latest project GLAUBE | LIEBE | HOFFNUNG (Faith, Love, Hope). As it was the case with the other images in the show, I took the term “love” a step further, expressing what usually happens when humans are in love. In essence, it is a constant fight. A fight for yourself, a fight for the other one or a battle for the both of you. So the subtitle of this one is: “The Battle of the Hearts”
"Love" - from GLAUBE | LIEBE | HOFFNUNG
We shot this in June 2009 at an old warehouse in the harbor of Basel. Once again the Zurich based agency FOTOGEN provided us with two very talented models for this story. Sarah and Zacharias were a blast to work with! Also on set we had Thierry Leyva acting as my fellow assistant. And very importantly on this one: Fräulein Scharlach who did all of the SFX make up.
Just a quick update today. Below is a little BTS from last night’s grand opening of photo09 in Zurich. The place was packed with 1500+ people and we all had great time. It’s always nice to meet folks year after year at the biggest photo event in Switzerland. Among some old friends like Klaus-Martin Gareis I had the pleasure of meeting Boris Baldinger, someone I have known “digitally” for some 3 years but had never met in person until last night!
