“Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.”—Louis Pasteur Matthew Richards, a photojournalist based in Thailand, left a kind comment on an image on my wire service news feed, and it got me thinking about Louis Pasteur, science, music, and photography. Not necessarily in that order. I like music, always have; and if I’d followed my mother’s advice to practice more, I might have become a musician instead of a photographer who plays fingerstyle guitar well enough that no one leaves the room when I’m playing, but not a lot better. I also like to photograph music and musicians, in the studio and on stage, both for shits and giggles and for clients. (I shoot for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example.) I’ve been shooting a number of the concerts for a wire service at Celebrate Brooklyn! this summer, and the drill for press photographers is usually something like this: the first three songs in the pit in front of the stage, the rest of the set out in the house and don’t make a pest of yourself. This is an annoying policy from a photographer’s point of view, more understandable from the artist’s and audience’s point of view.
Corporate, advertising and editorial photography