Best of the East Bay 2009 – Bands Photoshoot

Last Saturday I did a shoot for the East Bay Express with the bands that will be playing on the main stage at the Best of the East Bay 2009 Party. All 13 bands:

Souls of Mischief
Goapele
Fracas
Superfinos VTO
Mystic Rage
Maldroid
CU Next Weekend
7th Street Band
The Thrill of it All
Dizzy Balloon
The Heavenly States
Swann Danger
Social Unrest

The idea was to do a double-truck layout that would look sort of like one of those Rolling Stone Magazine covers where they take a bunch of separate photos of famous people against a white seamless background and then combine the images in Photoshop so it looks like they’re all part of the same photo, but with the twist that the band members would be all mixed up, so you’ve got hip-hop dudes posing with metal dudes, R&B singers next to punks, etc. It’s a very eclectic lineup, so there are some pretty amazing combinations of people that you wouldn’t expect to see together.

I was a little nervous about this job since there were so many people to shoot and I don’t normally do a lot of composite work, so I wasn’t sure how it was all going to come together. It actually went really smoothly. Once I got everything set up, the shoot was really fun, the bands were a blast to work with, and I’m totally happy with how it all came out. Other than spending a truly ridiculous amount of time working on this project in Photoshop, it could not have gone better.