MNU Jazz Band – Mainz, Germany

Okay, so I haven’t updated this blog in a while. And a lot has happened since I last did. For example, I went on tour with the MidAmerica Nazarene University Jazz Ensemble during the month of May. The trip (3.5 weeks) consisted of many concerts all over Germany and even into Switzerland. My job was to document the whole trip through photos and video. The result was 4513 pictures. To be honest, I’m surprised it wasn’t more. (But I think I was being careful not to run out of memory storage before the trip was over.) Either way, I have a lot of images to work on this month and then even go through the hours of video I have. The full galleries with images from each of the cities and sites we went to can be found on my main site at http://www.andrewiwersen.com. (Not all galleries are finished at this time, but I will continue to update them as I complete them). Anyways, it is my intention to use this blog to kind of dive deeper into what made certain images and the stories behind them. I really hope that, in this way, you can get a bit more of a glimpse into our experiences over in Europe.

To begin this I am actually starting in the middle of our trip. Mainz, Germany. Don’t ask why I’m doing so, I just am. Sometimes the editing experience is… sporadic. Anyways…

In Mainz we worked with KiA (Kirche in Aktion; http://www.kiamainz.de/).

But how about a look at the Cathedral in Mainz:

Mainz Cathedral 2

Mainz Cathedral and Market

I have to say, I was completely in love with the architecture on this cathedral. These two shots each show a different side of it. I actually used a film filter (Fuji Superia 100) in Photoshop to give the top pic a certain ‘color-popping’ feel. And then the bottom one has an interesting dynamic, with the cathedral towering up on the edge of the plaza on a beautiful, but busy day at the market.

Also at the cathedral I found this:

Cathedral Statue

Europe is excellent for photos of statues. This one is in front of the cathedral in Mainz, and unfortunately, I don’t remember the story behind the statue. But I absolutely love this shot of it. I also love this next shot of one of the band members, Amanda, taking a moment for prayer inside the cathedral:

Cathedral Prayer

I went ‘artistic’ with this image and gave it a strong black and white old photo effect. I think the flow of light in this shot and the composition really attracted me to this image (if it doesn’t show).

Here’s a shot from our first concert there:

Mainz Performance

This pic shows one of the songs with all of the five vocalists in the band. I think what makes this image interesting is its use of lines. It was certainly good to have another concert where I could take shots from up above. At many of the concerts on the trip, I shot from down low, in order to not be an irritant to the audience’s view. And speaking of audience…

Mainz Audience

This is probably my favorite audience shot from the entire trip. Audience members are a difficult subject to get good photos of. Once they see you getting ready to take a shot of them, they react awkwardly and the moment is lost. It’s a constant battle. But in this instance, I think the camera won. Either way, in my book, this lady is just plain awesome.

Last, for now… my favorite images from our time in Mainz. These were taken after the concert and after everything had been loaded onto the bus. A number of the bands members had congregated in a circle and began to play a game known as “Big Booty”. It’s quite a strange and wild game, and therefore certainly entertaining. I eagerly found my way into the center of the circle and stole a number of fantastic portraits of the members while they were playing. In editing, I went ahead and experimented with two different effects on these. Half of them I used a thermal ‘black’ and ‘white’ film filter (with much tweaking in order to maintain shadows and highlights). The outcome was quite rad, a sort of print film-look using a bluer contrast and overexposures of some whites. (I especially like the one of Adam W.) On the other half, I created what I call a copper/silver effect. It’s really just a colorization and desaturation effect, but it turned out just as cool as the thermal film effect and worked better on a couple of the images. Enjoy: