Music Magazine Assignment

Research Tasks:

1- Notes and examples of portrait photography.

What is Portrait photography?
Portrait photography also known as portraiture is the capture by means of photography of the likeness of a person or a small group of people which is known as a group portrait, in which the face and expression is predominant.

The objective of portrait photography is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the subject. Like other styles of portraiture, the main focus of the photograph is the person's face, although the entire body and the background may also be included. A portrait is not generally a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. Most of the time a portrait often shows a person looking directly at the camera.

Differerent Styles of Portrait photography-

Modern studio portrait photography.
Modern studio portrait photography is very relaxed and informal which is perfect for kid’s portraits and family group photos.

Unlike the older styles of studio portrait photography, the potted plants and canvas backrounds with stiff formal posing has gone and our modern studio portraits are taken on a plain background usually white or black with the emphasis on the subject and fun.





Relationship portrait photography.
Relationship photography is timeless portrait photography exploring and highlighting the relationship with the ones that you love.

It is a simple style of portrait, with little or no props and usually in black and white which is full of emotion and depth with the clothing kept dark to maximize the impact of the images, your attention will always be drawn to the subject. A lot of people have this sort of portrait photography done for them and there babies like when a new baby is born etc.





Two Portrait photographers:

Anton Corbijn -
Anton Corbijn is a well known Dutch photographer, music video and film director. He has done a huge amount of work behind the visual output of Depeche Mode and U2, he has also handled the principal promotion and sleeve photography for both for more than a decade.

Corbijn was born in Strijen, in Netherlands. He first started his career of music photographer when he saw the Dutch musician Herman Brood playing at a little cafe in Groningen also in the Netherlands, this was around 1975. He then took a lot of photos of the 'rising star' Herman Brood & His Wild Romance over time. Because of the pictures taken by Corbijn, Brood's fame rose quickly and as a result Corbijn's own exposure increased which he was very pleased about.

Over the years Corbijn has photographed loads of different famous people here are a few examples, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, U2, David Bowie, Miles Davis, Björk, Captain Beefheart, Kim Wilde, Robert de Niro, Stephen Hawking, Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Clint Eastwood and Herbert Grönemeyer, amongst others.

As well as photographing these famous people over the years he has also designed album covers for artists like U2, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Bryan Adams, Metallica, Therapy?, The Rolling Stones, R.E.M., The Bee Gees, Saybia and Moke.

Here are a few examples of his work:









Kevin Cummins -
Kevin Cummins is a well known British photographer born 14th July 1953 Manchester England. He has done a lot of work photographing rock bands back in the 70s and still photographing musicians today.

Kevin Cummins first studied photography in Salford as he had a passion for photography from a very young age. His career first started professionally in the the mid 1970s when he started to photograph rock bands. Cummins had a 25 – year association with the NME, which included 10 years as their chief photographer. Over the years he has photographed all of the major musicians including,Joy Division, Manic Street Preachers, The Clash, Sex Pistols, R.E.M., U2, Patti Smith, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, The Smiths, Roisin Murphy, Oasis, Foo Fighters, Courtney Love, Michael Hutchence, The Stone Roses[ and Buzzcocks.

Over time his images have been seen a contributing factor in the rise of the Manchester and Cool Britannia scenes. Cummins was an instrumental in establishing City Life, Manchester's what’s on guide and he was also a founding contributor to The Face, which was the influential style magazine where he won an award for Magazine Cover of the Year.

Cummins’s photographs have been used extensively in cinema and TV documentaries which have included Grant Gee's Joy Division and John Dower's Pop. In November 2009, Kevin was awarded an Outstanding Contribution to Music Photography award by the music industry website: Record of the Day. He worked extensively for the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester when it opened in the late 1970s through to mid-1980s.

Here are some examples of his work:









Existing magazines within the same genre of photography:









Ideas for images:



We thought that we would try and make something a bit like this portrait photo of the murderdolls, something along these sort of lines.

We came up with an idea of having them wearing masks a bit like slip not, but we then changed our minds to just white ones, but this is what we had in mind to start off with.



The masks that we thought of having were like the ones from the phantom of the opera.

Production tasks - Original images and edited images

Here are the original images that we chose to edit with the different background's for our final layout:















Here are the finished edited pictures with the super imposed backrounds:

Magazine layout for Band

This is the final layout for the band, taken from some of the magazines that we researched.

Final Layout Evaluation

Throughout this project I feel that the research that I conducted to start off with helped me a lot. The reason why I feel this way is because at first when we were first given the assignment I didn’t really have much of an idea on the different ways that you can shoot portrait photography but once I had looked into the different work of portrait photographers and looked at the different styles of portrait photography, this gave me a bigger understanding of how to take the photos.

When I started to look at different magazine layouts on the issuu website most of them seemed quite complicated to construct because there were loads of different things put together on them but soon after woods I managed to find some which matched the style of the portrait photography that I was shooting. As soon as we had a chance to speak to the actual band that we were going to be taking the photos of, this gave as a better understanding of what they were looking for.

The type of style of portrait photography that they wanted was like a strange and interesting style as they are like a progressive rock sort of band, so once we had this style in our minds we came up with the idea to have abandoned buildings like hospitals super imposed in the background. To make this more interesting we had some of the photos with them wearing white masks and others without them. Once we had come up with this idea we began to shoot the band in the photography studio, we shot about 120 photos then we picked out about 21 to narrow them down and from there we picked the ones that we thought would work best with the backgrounds’ that we had chosen.

As soon as we had edited three of the photos with the backgrounds’ super imposed we had another meeting with the band, the reason for this was because we wanted to show them the finished images to see what they thought of them and they were very pleased with how they come out. We then interviewed the band so that we could have some text to incorporate onto the final magazine layout.

When it came to creating the layout at first we already sort of had an idea of how we wanted it to look but when we had edited it all together it didn’t really look like anything that we had saw before, so we then began to create another one matching the same sort of layout of one of the magazines that we had look at originally and this came out very interesting and looked very professional.

Overall I am very pleased of the finished layout because the images came out very well and worked very good with the text that we had incorporated into the layout from the interview.