Jess Medway shoots music inspired images for the Personal Portfolio module
18th September 2022
AD4745 – The Personal Portfolio
The brief for this module was based around us picking our desired specialty in photography. We had to produce 10 or more images that work together in a series, with a minimum of two images being shot on medium format cameras.
My speciality, being music, had been decided on for a year or so already, that being said this project allowed me to develop my skills in this area of photography further as well as allowing me to demonstrate my work in various formats.
The following work you’re about to see had been shot for this module in collaboration with various music artists in and around Cheltenham.
Live Music:
Live music is one of my favourite subcategories to shoot, I have collected some of my submission pieces along with some previous images I shot an used as inspiration for this module:
This image is of the artist Jason Allan (@imjasonallan on instagram) was captured in Birmingham whilst he was on a European tour with the Hara, a well-known band in the pop punk scene. The lighting of this image was just perfect due to the lighting of the stage at the time. I later developed this image further into a vinyl sleeve to be able to showcase the versatility of my images as a music photographer.
Studio work:
As a music photographer it is not uncommon to be asked to create promotional content for social media as well as covers for albums. This being said, I wanted to create some studio work to show that it is something I am confident in doing if/ when I get asked for it in the future.
This shoot was done with the amazing Lucy Parish, a music student here at UoG. She has a certain mysterious yet feminine aesthetic to her personality as well has her music which is something I really wanted to portray through our shoot. Keeping with her vibe she chose to wear all black whilst we lit the set with red and pink gels to produce a warmer hue to images. The flowers we used definitely unlocked the feminine side of her aesthetic whilst keeping with the dark ‘edge’ she has with the dark makeup. These photos were taken so I could turn them into a digipak style vinyl sleeve in a real world edit, which I would later submit as one of my final pieces for the module. It contained 8 studio images all edited in post to look like the final draft of a sleeve such as containing doodles, artists notes and track lists.
Backstage:
Whilst shooting live music events I enjoy capturing the pre gig ‘antics’ / backstage on 35mm film. It adds to the grunge aesthetic that most bands have and therefore will often be used for promotional content.
I later used these film images to produce retro style album art, and more importantly cassette sleeves to submit.
If you like what you have seen and would like to follow my development in the music industry as a photographer, please feel free to drop a follow on Instagram @jmedwayphotographyy