This is how I go forward with my music - the real story from November 2017 and towards the album release but it took Volume 2 to get the whole way there. Creating, editing and mixing music is a complicated effort but loads of fun.
For all you who wa...
This is how I did a professional music promotion photoshoot in the summer of 2018. If you want to know all the gruesome details, keep reading. Your support helps me do stuff like this. Thanks.
For the indie musician:
If you are an indie musician, you can, and have to, do many things all by yourself, from making music to promotion on social media, to paying bills and balancing your book, do live shows, etc. But you cannot and should not take professional pictures of yourself to use in your promotion, on Internet sites and on your CD covers. Selfies are not o.k. It's not good enough to get some friend who knows nothing about light and design to take a shot with his phone. Get some professional photographer to do it. Why? Because the more professional you look the more seriously people will take you.
This chapter is about how I did my first professional photoshoot before the release of the album Change My Mind. My hope is that by being honest about my failures and by sharing what works, I will be able to help other aspiring indie musicians to get their photos right the first time. It is written from the musician's perspective and has no detailed info about how to take great pictures - I'll leave that to the photographers to do.
At the bottom you'll find additional resources for the indie musician who want to know more about my resources. There are many more tios out there on the Internet, but maybe this is a good start for you. O.k.. here we go with my story:
Why I did a professional photoshoot and re-did my album cover
When I went to Nashville and first presented my demo album everything about that album was below professional. I really wasn't aware of what was professional yet and I am sad to say, I blew it over there in every way because I didn't know. If a soup tastes bad it is bad. Needless to say, I was politely told to do some work on the album before releasing it. Since Nashville, I have worked to get everything up to a professional standard.
The CD cover was no exception. Although it was printed professionally, the picture on the front cover was not taken in high definition (it was a poor quality screenshot of a video), pimped in Pixlr and designed in all haste by yours truly in Canva. See it here below:
I thought the filter that made my jacket look like shreds was cool. They thought it added to the feeling of poor quality. The filter I used to make the wine red door look cool and bright red turned me and my hair into a crazy yellow glow and you couldn't easily read the text. There was too much going on.
The cover for the Change My Mind Demo (too yellow, unclear text and pixels! UGH!
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I don't have a HD camera except the one on my phone. It's an android and with a good camera I can take great pictures but not like Laila Gustafsson, my friend's cameras - professional ones. So I took some time to take an extra day up in Gothenburg, (when I was there for a family gathering). I stayed overnight at her place and we were to do a photoshoot they following day. But we took some time to hang out together and I played some music for her and her husband.
