A.E.LANDES PHOTOGRAPHY

A friend here in State College recently took a fire-breathing and torch-spinning class (called ‘poi’ for those of you in the know), and here are some of the images I took of her and her friends performing. I decided to go black-and-white with the images so I could get the flames to jump out against the black background and the blurry movements of the performers. It really was very entertaining and it was no laughing matter as the stakes are high dealing with fire so close to the body. It was too windy to do the actual fire-breathing, so I am looking forward to photographing another session.

Take a look at the Gallery of Torch-Spinning and Fire-Eating.

This was another great departure from ‘normal photography.’ Sometimes I just need to let the colors and shapes loose all over the frame, playing with the theatric lighting, long exposures, and flash. I hope you also enjoy the crazy compostions which relate the energy and characters of The Pink Spiders and The Color Fred in this small venue. Enjoy!

This is the Indie Rock Show - 11/2/07 Gallery.

This was a Monty Are I and Amber Pacific show here in State College. I really do love shooting in mixed lighting - you can pull a decent image out of a slurry of ambient colors and shapes and WHAM! get someone’s image to show up through it all using a flash. I wish I had more opportunities to satisfy this creative color bug, but that’s okay - I wanted these images to be pretty gritty and contrasty to get the energy of the bands. I hope you enjoy!

Here is the Indie Rock Show - 9/12/07 Gallery.

Joy and Sheng-Tung Wu recruited me to shoot a performance to benefit the De’Ang, a minority group in China facing a lot of pressure and prosecution from the government. This was one of my first performances to shoot, and a lot of lessons were learned including how to shoot dark stages, action, and color balancing. I had my friend’s camera setup at the time, so a lot of the shots came out as surprises. Overall, however, the shoot went very well, and we ended up with a lot of keepers. I really enjoy challenges like this, and especially if it benefits an extremely worthy cause.

Check out the Dance for De’Ang Performance.