Nick Harmer
Current Music landed some big names long before Embedded: Radiohead played all of “In Rainbows” on New Year’s Eve 2006. We crashed MoMA to film a show with Sigur Ros and then let the Flaming Lips crash Current to debut their Christmas on Mars. We recruited thousands of fans to help make “All Eyes on My Morning Jacket.”
But it was the time we spent with Death Cab For Cutie as the band finished their album “Narrow Stairs” and prepared to go on tour—captured in a half-hour special called “Open Windows”—that we pointed to when explaining to our bosses (and to managers, artists and record labels) just what kind of show we wanted to make more of. [Watch a preview for of the show here; sadly our rights to the full piece have expired, so it's not online.]
Spend that much time with a band and you’ll learn plenty you weren’t expecting to, like that Death Cab’s bassist, Nick Harmer, is one hell of a photographer. His specialty is making “tilt-shift miniatures,” photos that look as if they’ve been shrunk or shot from an airplane, skewing your perspective. Nick took us along for a Tour Stop segment in San Francisco, then walked us through his own post-production process.
In this outtake, Nick gives a step-by-step tutorial in Photoshop:
Here are more of Nick’s own photos, from his Flickr:
Read more with senior producer Alex Simmons about shooting Nick’s Tour Stop here. And be sure to tune in tonight at 11/10c and watch the full segment with Nick.
UPDATE: Watch the full Tour Stop with Nick Harmer, and learn a whole lot more about his love for photography and tilt-shift faking on Embedded.
