shakin' with the bluebottles

I had never heard The Bluebottles when Mic asked me to take photos for his new band. But that didn't matter: Mic had reference shots for me. Seeing as it was, apparently, an instrumental surf guitar band, the images we were working from were straight outta the sixties. Cheesy and over-the-top; just a bunch of good clean white boys having fun with guitars. (A side note on this particular image: in Googling around for info while writing this post, I came across what may be the only ever example of a drawing based on one of my photos. Awesome.)

We used colour and black and white because the old bands tended to use a lot of both, but because the reference shots were largely studio shots and we weren't in a studio, we had to accept that there would be some photoshopping necessary to get that flawless, smooth sixties look. (The photos here are the originals, though - I don't put any photoshopped work on this blog! Hence the unsightly white sheet in a lot of them.)

Getting the cheese to flow, so to speak, was pretty easy with these four - primarily because Rich and Jim have it in abundance, with or without a camera present. It made for a highly entertaining couple of hours, as well as some amazingly hilarious images.

Yeah, they were pretty great subjects. Even from these portraits it's clear which two like to pull faces. But evidently, the need for tomfoolery was merely encouragement for these two - encouragement to take it much further than anyone needed it to go. And so I leave you with a few of the unconventional gems of the day - photos that definitely couldn't (or shouldn't) be used for promotional purposes.