Merlefest is one of my favorite music festivals of the year. It’s a great opportunity to photograph bands both live and for promos. Bands often have hours of downtime in between sets and will jump at the idea of a photoshoot. I contacted Town Mountain’s manager and set up a time for a photoshoot in the late afternoon.

Step 1 – Location
Both the easiest and hardest part of any photoshoot is the location. Finding a great spot with great lighting can be difficult, but once you find it you really don’t have to do much else. I remembered this particular spot overlooking Merlefest from years past. It was made much more accessible by a good samaritan passing by in a golf cart. As is the case with most sunset photoshoots, you have about 20 minutes of time to shoot where the lighting would be perfect.

Step 2 – Outline your shot
Each member of the band was given a specific place to stand to make sure there would be no overlapping in the final image.

Step 3 – Photographing your subjects
Contrary to popular believe, I often do not photograph everyone in a single shot. This would require significantly more lights, resources and accuracy. I was able to shoot each member individually by leaving the camera on a tripod and focusing on one subject at a time with a single light. This has multiple benefits. For one, you can fine tune how the lighting will look on each subject, as well as get multiple lit subjects into a single shot (see below). Another benefit is that other people tend to also focus on the subject and help with making them laugh and feel more comfortable (as opposed to everyone having to focus on the camera for a single shot). This is the most intensive part of the shoot, as it is important to get enough shots of each person while being sure not to move anyone from their designated spots.

Step 4 – Editing
When building images shot by shot you have the luxury of picking the best shot of each person to be compiled together. Once the images were selected I brought them into Photoshop to be processed. Each image was masked so that only the subject in focus was displayed (This is where making sure subjects don’t overlap with other people or complex objects during the photoshoot is helpful). I find the masking process to be about 10x faster with a Wacom tablet and highly recommend one if you’ll be doing a lot of masking.

Final Image
Once all the shots were compiled into a final image I added a curves adjustment layer for contrast and some overall color correction. I also added a vibrance adjustment to make the image pop a little. After you do a few photoshoots with the “build” method the editing will become faster as you will know things to look out for during the shoot that will help things run efficiently in post production.

Check out more about Town Mountain and their trip to Merlefest

Uwharrie Adventures is the mecca for ourdoor motorsports in North Carolina. This particular demolition derby was the first of their season in late april. The flat bed trucks began to roll in before the dew of the spring morning had a chance to evaporate. Roughly 50 cars drove down to the demo pit but only one would be able to make the drive back up the hill. Before the races began, I was fortunate enough to meet a driver, Mike, who let me put my GoPro helmet camera is his car. What a great little camera the GoPro is. Perfect exposure both inside and outside the car. The camera was mounted on the inside cross bar just behind the driver.

Photographing the race proved to be more challenging that I first anticipated. I was shooting with a Sigma 70-200mm 2.8 lens. Even with a strong zoom lens I still found myself ducking away from dust and flying dirt every time a car would drive. At first the dust was an inconvenience but as soon as the sun set behind the cars all the dust lit up and creating a beautiful atmosphere to shoot the cars. The sky radiated a perfect orange glow and provided light bursts that seemed to mold the cars with just the right amount of contrast.