Soloists at the North Carolina Symphony

I recently had the great opportunity to photograph a couple of members of the North Carolina Symphony for some upcoming concert promotions, both print and on the web.  I always love the opportunity to get paid for my photography, of course, but I also always love new opportunities and new challenges.  I jumped at the chance to do some portraits of Dovid Friedlander and Melanie Wilsden.

In some ways, shooting portraits of musicians is old hat–portraits are what I shoot mostly, after all.  But each shoot is a new opportunity to be enriched by talented and interesting people, and to make new contacts, and to try new things.  These were my first posed shoots with instruments, for example, and it was fun to try to figure out how to pose them with those instruments to showcase both the artist and their musical tools.

I also think that what musicians do is somewhat analogous to what photographers do–their playing is part craft, part art, and soul and emotion are every bit as important as any other art.  Where they have an oboe and a violin, we have a camera and a lens.  Just as a musician can be technically proficient without any soul in their music, so can a photographer take lifeless, but technically perfect, photographs.

Without waxing too poetic, it was really fun to meet Dovid and Melanie, to have a little bit of time to get to know them, to have that moment in their lives and to try to capture it all in a way that is authentic and beautiful.  I hope that I’ve achieved that for them, and that my photographic life will continue to be filled with interesting opportunities and tremendously talented people.