Photography: Chris Pate (Promo Shooting)

Hey guys!

Ever had to do something you weren't sure you could do?
I just had to!

It's quite obvious that I'm absolutely into music photography; photographing live shows is just one of my favourite things to do.

Since I've recently became a part of the team behind Chris Pate, I just had to dive into portrait photography.
As the photo/press/social media part of the team, I'm now responsible for press and promo shots.

If you know a bit about photography, you'll know that there are also many genres of photography and they all differ.
Whilst I've been focused on gig photography for the last four years, I never really gave other genres a go.

Last week I was thrown in the cold water, pushed out of my comfort zone and guys? I loved it!
I wasn't sure if I'd be able to deliver a good job when it comes to portraits, but I'm really happy with the results.

Below are the promo shots I've done with/for Chris Pate.

If you're interested in hearing what it's like for a gig photographer to jump into another field - read on!

Shooting promo photos comes with a lot of responsibility - you have to visualize the musician's personality, their sound, their style.
Since I've known Chris for years now, all I had to do was to figure out how I want to compose the image and where I want to shoot it.

In this post you'll find two photographs of Chris sitting down; those were taken spontaneously at the venue. We had enough time before the show so we wandered around to get some alternative photos with different backgrounds.

The main images were taken on my balcony; the grey wall seemed to fit perfectly into the theme we were looking for and the natural daylight was a dream.

When it came to telling Chris what to do, I had very little requests because a) I wanted him to do what's comfortable for him and b) he already knew what do to.

The only things I directed where taking a few steps forward to achieve depths of field effects.

I'm sure that once I grow more into portrait photography, I'll end up directing the images a lot more, but for the start this was enough.







Editing wise I didn't have to do a lot.
I decided to turn two pictures black and white but kept the rest in colour.

The black, white and grey colour theme works well for Chris and his music, so the combination of his clothes and the grey wall was good enough and didn't ask for any editing.

I've corrected the lighting, slightly cropped a few images and added more contrast.
That's literally everything I've done to the photographs.









Working with Chris was super relaxed and easy. No surprises, no drama but respect from both sides.
Cheers for that!







I hope you enjoyed this post, if you have a few minutes, please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think about the images. :)


Listen to Chris below:






Chris Pate online: Twitter | Facebook | Bandcamp | Soundcloud





Thank you for reading!

Credits // Text & Photography: Vanessa Jertschewske