Almost a year since the last shoot I did with White Light Parade. Turns out they’re getting into the studio again, and needed some shots doing. Happy days.

In the two years I’ve been photographing these guys the band has seen quite a few changes, both in music style and band members. The band started as an edgy, brit-rock four piece, supporting the likes of The Enemy, The Subways and Kasabian. When I met them, they had acquired a fifth member and moved to a more punk-rock sound, touring with both Fightstar and blast-from-the-past InMe. By the time of the last shoot I did a year ago, they’d lost one founding member and gained two more new faces. Safe to say that it’d been a changeable couple of years!

The guys have now settled again as a four piece, with Mark in place as the new drummer. The sound has reverted back to their original, not-too-heavy brit-rock style, and it seems to be paying dividends – new single ‘Want You To Know’ has received a significant amount of airplay on the Sky Sports network and on Sky 1’s Soccer Saturday. Hopefully there’ll be an album not far around the corner too – wait and see!

For the shoot we arranged to meet in the historic town of Saltaire – the same location I used for my shoot with the guys from Geek a few weeks back, although this is purely coincidental. Although we were pushed for time, and limited for locations (on account of the town being packed with tourists) I wanted to come away with two different styles in two locations. We started off on one of Saltaire’s traditional cobbled streets near the station. For this shoot I relied on natural light – mainly because my lighting brollies kept blowing over! I used one off camera flash gun for fill, and got a handful of shots that looked quite natural:

With the first shot looking quite wintery, we headed over to the park across the river to try and get something that looked less seasonal. Although we were on the lookout for some woodland, we settled on the balcony overlooking the park, by the statue of Titus Salt. By this point the sun had started to come through, and produced the ideal opportunity for me to try a fashion-style technique that I’ve long been trying to get my head around. Not to get too techy, the basic premise is that you underexpose your shot to pull through the colour of the sky, then compensate the lack of exposure with off camera flash. It’s tricky to master, but when it’s pulled off properly it looks shit hot. I managed to get a few shots here that were fairly close to what I was aiming for:

To say the shoot was arranged quite hastily without a great deal of planning, I’m pretty chuffed with the results. It was good to catch up with the guys again, and hopefully there’ll be more stuff in the pipeline. My portrait stuff seems to be getting better with every shoot, which is reassuring – Especially as it’s something I really want to focus on in 2012.