How we ended up spending a week on the Azores with a bunch of crazy photographers
Being a band sometimes can be the best job in the world
Sometimes as a band you just run into these lucky gigs unexpectedly. Through a photographer and friend of ours, Martijn Roos, we got connected to this community of photographers who were organising a photography workshop on the Azoren islands. In this blog we want to share some of the beautiful pictures they made and give special thanks to Don Bringas and Rafal Bojar for inviting us!
The unexpected journey
The great wedding photographer and friend Martijn Roos and his brother Thomas Roos are special people. Once you meet them they feel like long-time friends. They are able to make you feel home and they are home wherever they are in the world. Maybe that’s why we relate to them so easily. In one of our songs called ‘Stones’ we sing
“wherever we go we wanna feel at home, wherever we are we wanna rest our souls”.
Travelling is part of Wolf & Moon and it is part of the lifestyle of many photographers we’ve met. So one day we get this Facebook message from Rafal who says he likes our music and he would love to invite us to a workshop he’s organising. We actually had no clue of what that meant but once we heard it was on Soa Miguel (Azoren) we immediately said yes. We are always up for a gig when it involves traveling…
Finding your voice
What we signed up for was apparently this masterclass for wedding photographers. As a band you can always use photo and video material but normally we have to beg our friends to help us out. So this was an amazing opportunity. Now we were on this beautiful island with the most talented and friendly people who actually enjoyed taking photo’s of us. We also happen to have a higher-than-usual interest in photography so it was great for us to take part in the masterclasses. We heard as a photographer you have to ‘find your voice’ which means you have to develop your own distinctive style. So this is not so different from being a musician. As a band we are always developing our sound and we found a large part of our voice by working with our producer John Anderson. Very often you need to work together with people to find out what makes you unique. As an example of this you see that the photo’s above this paragraph are shot by Don Bringas . While he was giving this masterclass this other photographer Dani Rodriguez took the photos below. You can clearly see there different voices and we really LOVE both of them.
That’s great isn’t it?! In music you can also see this when you hear people covering a song. One of the finest examples of this is Hallelujah written and performed by Leonard Cohen and the cover by Jeff Buckley. You can love both pieces as they have very distinctive styles and differences but the song (subject) is the same. Besides the masterclasses, given by the finest photographers on the planet, there was a packed program and luckily they also thought of having some music in the evening. During one of their workshops we just tagged along and went to an awesome black beach. We like to bring a guitar to these places because playing outdoors is one of the best things in life. The videographer Sebastian Nandryka (superstudios.pl) was able to capture this amazing one shot of us singing our song “Stones”:
Garden of potential
After our gig we could have just chilled and do nothing but that is just not how this band works. We are a ticking-time-bomb ready to explode and when we got the opportunity to work with Ivan Monagas and Angela Lopez on our videoclip we jumped on it. Waking up at 5:30 am to drive off at 6:00 is somehow easier one a beautiful island because you know you’re going to get served with a nice sunrise and the air is just perfect. Our choice to shoot a videoclip for our song “Garden of Potential” came easy because the island is just a perfect fit with the lyrics of the song. Ivan and Angela are a creative couple who just loves a challenge. They are some of the hardest working people we know and were all up for the adventure. Together we drove to some fascinating spots and if once we found something great we discovered something better around the corner. Even if you would write a concept and plan it very well it wouldn’t work as good. Here is a preview shot of the videoclip that is coming out one day:
Grateful
Thinking back we feel so grateful for everything that happened and everybody with whom we connected. We didn’t expect to get so inspired and do so many cool things. We cried every evening because the presentations and personal stories of the Photographers were so good. We even went to a surprise elopement that was set on the black beach and everybody was wearing masks, the sun was setting behind it and Fismoll was playing, talking of perfection. We want to thank everybody we met at the camp and especially, Don and Rafal for making this happen.
