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When January rolls around, one constant for the past decade has been the crew from Damn Ugly Photography has gotten to load a couple of thousand pounds of gear into a small room at the Harvard Club to shoot the members of the annual Barron’s Round Table. The basic formula is always the same. We start shooting at 8:00AM as the folks arrive. We have to shoot them separately since we need to be able to move each person around into whatever situations we’ve cooked up…and we have to be completely finished by 10:00AM since that’s when their all-day meeting begins. In that time we have to come up with images that will run on three consecutive covers in January, plus the cover for the mid-year report in June, as well as inside feature photos for all issues. Easy, right?!!

Adrian DeLucca and I wanted this year’s theme centered on the year itself…2017…and we came up with the idea to place the Roundtable members into the year 2017. To do that, I had to come up with the perfect 2017. I always liked the numbers on the Damn Ugly World Headquarters building…

So that seemed like a good place to start. I found similar numbers and went about shooting them…

But the silver seemed too passive…red spray paint was definitely called for…

Numbers…done. Now onto the moving parts. Our setup this year was actually much simpler than previously years. We only had two separate sets, one for the January issues and a second for the midyear.

I had a couple of 2017 ‘cheats’ taped to the gobos on our main set to help me keep track of where to place people…

Everything got dialed in pretty quickly (that ripped seamless in the background is a teaser for the midyear cover, so I can’t say any more about that for a while) and we were ready to get started.

Makeup artist Margina Dennis, Kaz playing digital tech and Adrian looking happy…

Kaz holding up Brian Rogers…

Oscar Schafer shooting Jeff Gundlach…

To get people into the correct positions, we used a few very simple props. Brian had to lean into the ‘1’…

Mario was standing inside the ‘0’…

Abby was holding up the ‘7’…

And Oscar would be laying back into the ‘7’ for the Week 3 cover…

After a few days at the computer, here’s how things turned out…

Week One Cover and Inside Opener…

Week Two Cover and Inside Opener…

Week Three Cover and Inside Opener…

And finally, here are the printed pages…