Curse Mackey

Explanation

This should be a pretty fast and simple post for a pretty simple picture.

The subject here is Curse Mackey. I mentioned him a bit earlier in the post for Sin + Seraphim. As a musician, his music is probably best described as industrial darkwave. Said a bit more simply, it's dark feeling electronic music. As a performer, he makes use of visual media and has a pretty active set in terms of movement and action.

The picture is really simple. It's a single subject portrait with the subject taking up half the frame shot from below. I really like the color and grain, I'll talk more about grain in the roll post, and in general this is very much a vibe picture. It reminds me of the Mobley post from last year. It's a picture framed and set up to refer to iconic pictures and as a result it's not one that needs anything super complicated. It's a well known and well understood picture that everyone has seen before in one way or another.

What I do want to focus on is the focus of the picture. It's relatively soft but also still defined enough to work well. I don't think I'd actually want it to be sharper. The way the grain integrates with the focus is really pleasing to me and I feel like it matches the musical style here as well.

That's pretty much it for this post. I do want to say that I've been meaning to see Curse Mackey since SXSW last year and I was really glad to see his show this year. I hope I can catch more and different music to last year and I do want to do some simple stuff like this a bit more too. Not every picture needs to have complex composition and interesting interactions to tell a cohesive story. I think this picture in its simplicity tells a clear story and so I view this picture as a success.

Fun bit of context and storytime, the mic he's holding has tape on it because it was having issues and there was an entire bit of the performance where he was trying to fix it. The imperfection of live music is part of the fun and to me is a part of the joy of live music.