Music Photography Blog

by Adam Elmakias

Backstage Portraits 2013

One of my goals for this year was to do a few more portrait shoots this year than in the past. It’s hard. A lot harder than you probably think. Sure, I mean from the outside it’s something like “Adam has all this time with these bands, why can’t he just take pictures of their faces during the day? They probably don’t do shit all day anyway” – I wish. Bands are busy during the day, and after finding time in the schedule they have to be in the right mood, and after they are in the right mood I have to find somewhere to shoot it, and after I find a place to shoot it then I need to make sure they still want to do it.

Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photographing Vic Fuentes of Pierce The Veil Stuttgart, Germany – Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photographing Jaime Preciado of Pierce The Veil Stuttgart, Germany – Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photographing Vic Fuentes of Pierce The Veil Stuttgart, Germany – Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photo by Alexey Makhov
Photographing Jaime Preciado of Pierce The Veil Stuttgart, Germany – Photo by Alexey Makhov

If I was shooting a band only once, sure I might be okay with putting them in a bad mood as an outcome of the shoot–but I work with bands on multiple occasions so I would much rather not ruin a relationship because of one shoot and try to find the right moment to do it. In addition to that, I am very errrr superstitious? Not sure the correct term, but I am a big fan of “if it’s not the right time, it probably wasn’t meant to happen,” meaning that if I have to work too hard to get the shot or force it to happen, it just wasn’t meant to be. I am not using this as a sort of an excuse to not get a photo, I am just using this is a quality control mechanism.

If I force a portrait shoot out of a member every time I wanted one, they wouldn’t be as real as I would want them to be. This serious shit, yo. Anyway, here are a bunch of the portraits I shot throughout the year. These are all available for purchase for a limited time. Snag a few if you like em.

Purchase Limited Edition Backstage Portraits

Screenshot 2013-12-25 11.09.13

In addition, I did a lot of backstage portraits with artists that I won’t be able to sell but you can view/read about them here.

Backstage Portraits with Asking Alexandria, Motionless In White and While She Sleeps

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Backstage Portraits with Pierce The Veil, Let Live, Memphis May Fire, and Issues

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Backstage Portraits with Bring Me The Horizon

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Backstage Portraits with Of Mice & Men, Volumes, and Texas In July

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Backstage Portraits with You Me At Six

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I feel like this year was good, but I am going to make it next year better.