Meraki Photo Shoot – Creativity In Isolation – By Gavin Bain

July 2020. The rest of the world was in lockdown and isolation, but in Townsville, Queensland Australia we still retained most of our liberties. We were advised to be wise and most businesses adhered to state restrictions to close up but we were never given a stay at home order.

During this interesting time in humankind’s history, my good friend Luke sent me a message to say that his incredible band “Meraki” were looking to record some music videos whilst we all had the time, and wondered if I were interested in capturing some photographs of the process for them. This type of work is the work that I would LOVE to make a career out of so I jumped at the opportunity, plus I hadn’t seen Luke for quite some time.

I shot with my new at the time Fujifilm X100F and I also took my Canon Model 7, a Jupiter 12 lens and some Kentmere Pan 400. I had just ordered my Leica M6 online a few days before this so this would be my last shoot with the Model 7. A very fun send off.

I shot the film at 1600 and stand developed it in Rodinal 1+100 for an hour with no agitation. I wanted that big chunky grain to smack you in the face when you looked at the photographs.

The interesting part for me, was using the old Russian lens gave the light bulbs hung from the ceiling rig a sort of anamorphic flare that Michael Bay would salivate over. Below I’ll post one more film photograph and a result from my Fuji X100F to show the difference.

Overall I had a tonne of fun photographing this for them. And I was glad to get a roll of film in as well. Luckily I am a musician myself and grew up around production sets so I knew to keep out of the video crews shots, although I’m sure they’ve had to bin footage from me popping my head in frame accidentally. I’m told that the videos are nearing completion in final production. From what I saw on the night, and the footage I saw on the back of the video cameras when I walked past it’s going to look and sound  BRILLIANT.

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