Decoding Brandon Woelfel
Think of the stars. Everybody likes stars. It’s visceral to the human mind. A sea of sparkling lights. I often like to travel outside the city simply to look at the stars.
Think about the following scene: A “star” walking down the red carpet. A silhouette carving out glamour and sophistication in the sea of flashing lights. A staple frame of any red carpet sequence in a movie.
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Brandon Woelfel?
When I recently asked that question on Instagram, everybody said the same one thing: Lights. Specifically, it’s a “bokeh of fairy lights.” It’s an over-simplified, inaccurate explanation of Brandon’s vibe. But that’s not quite where the story lives.
In our staple frame of the red carpet, a person walks by as all eyes are fixated to someone who literally carries the moniker of a “star”. The fixation, the heightened attention, is in the awareness that the “precious” moment will be over in the blink of an eye. A hysterical burst of camera flashes, “the sea of sparkling lights”, exemplifies the fleeting moment.
As all lights surround the star, Brandon surrounds her model with a bokeh of lights as she takes the centre *coughs* stage *coughs* frame.
This chic-showbiz theme continues outdoors, as he captures portraits in a bokeh of distant city lights, neon lights, etc. He always captures at the same time of the day as our staple scene: Dusk.
Indoors, these are usually fairy lights, but Brandon has expanded his collection to include a variety of everyday sources of lights: Wall Signs, CDs, Prisms, and other Objects.
A bit technical...
These pictures are exposed very low on a Nikon Full Frame Camera so that he can enhance in post without any noise and losing any detail. Remember, he is shooting LIGHTS. Exposing low allows him a full dynamic range of colours in the face of lights.
Every element in the scene is pure eye candy, visceral to the human mind. Bright, and Colorful. He chooses the Cotton Candy colour palette for his edits.
Now all that is left...
Capture something that will be over any moment. Justify the heightened attention of the viewer. And this is exactly what he does: “Capture fleeting moments.”
In a video collaborating w/ Brandon Woelfel, YouTuber & Photographer, Peter McKinnon, talks about how he always keeps his models moving to capture a burst of frames. The models are always doing a variety of things uninterrupted. Each frame captures something that ceases to exist a microsecond later.
And now the most difficult step: Choice. What he evidently ends up with is a series of very similar shots, only marginally better/worse than each other. And he has to choose between a series of these very similar shots. That’s a skill, a compounded behaviour, every photographer only develops over time as he weighs the arc of emotion stimulated over a series of shots. You have to look for the little details to pick out the emotion at its peak.
- Bokeh of Lights.
- Dusk.
- Centred Frame.
- Cotton Candy Color Pallete.
Brandon sticks to these elements as it culminates all attention of the viewer to the fleeting moment. Limitations inspire, almost mandates, creativity. Brandon chose his limitations based on a very singular theme, within which he draws attention to his alluring library of human emotions: the fleeting moments.
Since then, he has expanded his catalogue of lights, props, and locations as he gradually inculcated more things into the vibe he aspired. So the next time, you spot a Brandon Woelfel picture: instead of literally everything else, how about you talk a little more about the fleeting moment. That’s where the story lives.