Gray’s Anatomy – Alice Cooper gets the Grunge treatment

There were about ten other photographers in the photo pit and during the four songs that we were allowed, I got about 300 shots. I reviewed what I’d got when I got home. Some nice ones here, some bad ones there. A particularly mean scowl, some nice gnashing of teeth, good one of Alice in his red-and-black top hat. Before sending off my selection of 20 or so images I checked a couple of the agencies and they already had a fair number from the gig. As I scrolled through mine, they looked remarkably similar to those of the other photographers’. Using our professional cameras, we’d all got some nice crisp shots. But I felt slightly under-whelmed by them. Alice has been around a while and we’ve seen lots of photos of him in his scary goth make-up. How about – I thought, putting on my iphoneographer’s hat – if I apped up one or two of them? Give some of them a bit of a goth treatment.

So I emailed myself a couple of the images, opened them on the iPhone, tweaked them a little and added a couple of grunge filters. Nothing fancy. Seemed appropriate for Alice and for Halloween. And I slipped two of the resulting images into the 20 that I sent to the magazine. And to my pleasant surprise, they chose one of them as their main photo to accompany their review, see here.

DSLR cameras are great at capturing reality increasingly faithfully. iPhone cameras can’t compete on faithful reproduction. What they’re good at is precisely the opposite: images that are very different from reality. We see reality all the time with our own eyes, so sometimes it gets a bit boring. Even in heavy goth make-up and a red-and-black top hat’.

© Richard Gray

© Richard Gray