I’ve been seeing this a lot more often in social networking sites. Bands & solo artists that are unsigned making professional looking photos for their websites, show advertisements, and other promotional stuff. When I mean professional looking photos that means the musician have to play dress up, go in a photo studio and take all these fancy looking photos by a professional photographer which I’m sure charges a lot of money for photos. They claim they do this for marketing material, but I don’t buy it. I think they do it because they want to look like superstars.

I understand that photos are very important for bands & music artists. While I do like music photos myself, I just don’t care for the professional and fancy looking studio photos. It’s just silly to me, in my opinion. When you’re a local musician, you don’t need to spend all kinds of money and don’t need to go through all that.

Truthfully, if you’ve noticed over the years with my music, I never took photos seriously like most bands & musicians do. It’s not that I’m camera shy, I don’t mind getting my picture taken. I have always been focused on the music. I won’t pay a lot of money for a professional photograher to take photos of me in a studio, when you can do all that stuff for free with your own digital camera.

All those photos I’ve had over the years, they were just photos taken at the gigs. I let fans take photos of me whenever they wanted. I didn’t take photos of me at all of my gigs. Some of my gigs, somebody did take photos and some of them, no photos at all.

If I ever start putting out albums, I won’t use too many band photos either. On album covers, I would probably have art work instead of a photo of myself on the front of it. I’m a huge fan of art work. Graphic art, paintings, etc. So I would have stuff like that on my album covers.

I truly believe bands take themselves too seriously with the photos and they need to get over themselves. Especially when you’re just an unsigned musician and local. Don’t rely on photos too much with your music. I know bands love photos, they get too crazy over them because they love the attention and publicity, but truthfully, I don’t care. The only reason I agree to let people take photos of me at the gigs or even take photos with fans, is to be nice in return since the fans have been supportive of me at the gigs. If you’ve noticed I don’t go photo crazy in music, and I like it that way.

Kev