So I may or may not be a bit stuck on the Metallica Blacklist album that I've stumbled upon. The album doesn't drop until September but they've been slowly releasing a song here and there (there's 53 on the album). I love a good cover, especially when the artist manages to do justice to the original and still make the song their own. So far there's been some pretty badass music videos to go with the tunes they've released.
The video above is Diet Cig's cover of Unforgiven and the music video is really what grabbed my attention with it. Watching it put me to trying to figure out how I could do a photoshoot along similar lines. From the looks of it they were most likely using gunpowder for the in camera effects, I suspect the 'tracers' were added later.
Growing up, our 'playing with army men' looked rather similar to the music video. We didn't have access to gunpowder but we had more than enough fireworks to make up for it and along the way discovered that rubbing alcohol and acetone nail polish remover made great 'napalm'.
I'm pretty sure I can recreate the effects in the video for a photoshoot but I'm not sure how to set it up so that it's relatively easy to shoot and/or doesn't set the neighborhood on fire. Anybody got thoughts, ideas, suggestions? My first thought was to set it up on a table or two and just cover them with dirt or sand, it would allow for more angles to shoot from but keeping the tables from catching fire might be a bit of an issue. A patch of raw dirt or sand would work as well but here in the city there's not too many of those around where you can light some gunpowder and not have people get excited.
Photos are all from Derby Day last year, September 5th, when several hundred people showed up here in Louisville to 'play army men' albeit in slightly different fashion. If you're really bored you can play 'Count the American Flags' with the first photo. I don't know how many are in it but it should give you some idea why I have lots of negative associations with that flag at this point.
That's about enough out of me but before I wander off here is a CNN article about how the fish are tweaking.