mbarrick | The Nightclub: My Studio and My Studium

There are so many genres of photography and these days everyone is a photographer. It is not an arcane craft requiring special knowledge and difficult to attain materials and equipment as it was a century ago. The challenge in an overcrowded field is differentiating oneself. The real work is not that one nice shot that holds someone's attention for a few minutes anymore, but creating a body of work that stands apart.

The nightclub photo booth is an unusual area of photography. I'm limited by the bounds of the area I am given to shoot in. Most of the time I rely on my talented friends involved with the nights I shoot setting up the backdrops, but sometimes I have to improvise. I almost never know exactly what I going to have for a final set-up in advance and have to improvise my lighting using the fairly simple kit I bring. My kit is limited by the practical consideration of what I can fit in the trunk of a taxi. I have to set up the lights with the awareness that the people I will be shooting are not models and are there for fun, and a lot of them have been drinking, and some will have been drinking a lot. Most of the time the best place to put the flash as a lot more to do with where it won't get knocked over then the ideal placement to light the set I've been given to work with. It is an interesting middle ground somewhere between studio photography and roaming event photography.

You won't find me in the big clubs that cater to massive crowds, because there is rarely anything daring about mass-appeal. I stick pretty adamantly to the creative fringe that operates outside and often ahead of mass popularity. As such the people I photograph are "freaks", but what I do is no freak show the consumption of the normals and mundanes. I've never been popular because that means appealing to the masses and I have never been intersted in the dumbing things down that far. My audience is the same people I photograph.

Source: http://www.mbarrick.net/blog/110730/nightclub-my-studio-and-my-studium