Elise Trouw

Explanation

This is Elise Trouw, the extremely talented multi instrumentalist I came to watch who Tearjerk opened for. In terms of music, it's a bit jazzy and a lot of pop rock. But more than that, it's a showcase of her many talents, from percussion to guitar and bass to keyboard and singing. She manages to string together hypnotic loops live that are a marvel to behold.

Knowing that, I had to try at some multiple exposure pictures and this is my favorite of the bunch. And as this is a space I'm still actively experimenting in, there's a lot of room to try and do interesting things. It's a bit unfortunate that this ended up being the second to last picture on this roll because I made the absolutely obvious observation that I don't have to attempt to line up the frames. I've got an ongoing project to mix up two entirely different exposures and see what happens. Why I didn't make the jump during closely spaced in time multiple exposures I don't know. I'm a bit dumb like that sometimes. It can be really easy to miss obvious things when you're on autopilot or are in tunnel vision mode.

Anyways, this is a double exposure taken from two very different positions. Both are taken from roughly the same spot at stage left, pretty much resting against the pillar close to the stage at Empire where this show was happening. The first exposure is the upright one of Elise with her guitar singing. The second is taken in a low crouch to get an angle of her playing a bit of drums.

I really like how it comes out, there's a very 80s pop vibe to it. Part of that comes from the magenta, which may or may not have actually been closer to red? I don't remember the lighting perfectly and I'll talk more about it in the roll post. In some ways there's a bit of that whoa space meme going on with the fadeout to the right of the picture. It's trippy in a good way.

If there's one issue, and I don't really think it is one, it's that the exposure of her at the drums is a bit blown out up top. This is just the reality of taking a picture like this with bright spot lighting. The intersection point being her at the drums really strongly affects that part of the frame. I suppose I could have reoriented to move the exposure of her at the drums more to the left of the frame so the two lights don't overlap as much but it's hard to visualize these things in the moment.

Getting to that lighting, it's honestly a bit interesting how it plays out across this picture overall. As is clearly obvious, this is one of those shows that had some amount of smoke added, but what's interesting is how much the light is still very spotlighted. At times, especially with large amounts of smoke, the lighting can get very diffuse, but here it's still in that range where the lights have really clear directionality to them. I find it interesting that the bottom left of the frame is as dark as it is. Part of that is probably because there's a stage monitor there blocking in the lower position frame. The upright exposure is the one with the drumset in that corner so there's some reflection off them but overall it's not particularly lit there either. What I think happened here is that I was trying to approach this particular frame a bit differently from the others. A big part of that is that the upright exposure is pretty much shot a stop or two darker than middle grey while the down exposure is shot at roughly middle grey. This makes the bottom corner dark because it's dark in the down exposure and the upright exposure isn't that bright. The reason why the right side is lit is because of the down exposure, not the upright one. I'm not entirely sure that's what's going on here but that's the best explanation I have for how it turned out this way. The vertical magenta light is from the upright exposure as you can see it hitting the keyboard. This is definitely something I'll have to look into more deeply. The variables for these types of pictures are so complicated that it can be hard to keep track of them.

All this to say that this is a pretty cool picture that maybe leaves me with more questions than answers. And that's fun! I get to explore and try new things and work through new ways of thinking about photography and that's really all I can hope for. I've got a roll post and then it might be a bit until the next set of posts. But it's also possible there will be a lot of them, so we'll see what happens.