The American Photography AP32 Winners Slide Show will be announced tomorrow. I got two photographs accepted…
The portrait of Judy Collins I did for the Wall Street Journal…
And my shot of Patti Smith in the Amtrak departure area at Penn Station…
You can see these…and all the rest of the winners…over at the AP32 Winners Gallery here:
Click on any image to Enlarge
We just did back-to-back covers for American Banker…here’s how it went…
First, we headed to Morristown NJ to shoot Rich Lashley of PL Capital. Upon arrival, we found that PL Capital runs a pretty close-to-the-bone operation…which meant the entire place was two small offices and an equally small reception area. It was pouring that day, so shooting outside was outta the question, but we had to get creative fast. We cleared out as much of the reception area as possible and set up under a framed newspaper from the day of the Stock Market Crash of 1929…
…which gave us this series…
…for the feature opener…
Then we dropped a seamless for a bit of color…
But then I noticed Rich had a bright green baseball bat leaning against the wall…and besides the green looking great on that purple seamless, the metaphor of him being an ‘activist’ investor wielding a bat was just to good to pass up…
The cover…
A couple of weeks later we jumped on the Turnpike for a day trip to Wilmington Delaware to shoot Mark Turner, the President and CEO of WSFS Financial Corp. As soon as we got off the elevator we were greeted with a floor to ceiling bank of windows…
That was kind of a no-brainer. They also had a lot of this kinda stuff all over the walls…
But first we’d get a simple one-light seamless portrait out of the way…
Now to tackle those windows…
I figured on only needing one light for this, but the hot reflection on the window frames bothered me, so we put a grid on the mini-octa to focus the light more on him and keep it off the window…
With that reflection taken care of, we could get under way…
Finally, we had to try to make that ‘Word Wall’ exciting…
We succeeded…
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One of the best things about doing what I do is not knowing where I’m gonna be tomorrow, so when Dana Kien at the Wall Street Journal asked if I wanted to shoot Irish singer Enya, there was no hesitation when I said ‘Yes!”. She was going to be in New York to promote her new album and I could get an hour with her at her hotel between interviews and TV gigs. So Robert and I loaded up the van and drove downtown to the St. Regis Hotel…
I didn’t know what kind of suite we would have to work with, but I did know all of the rooms at the St. Regis face North, so we would probably have lots of soft window light to play with. And when we got there, the first thing I did was see how Robert looked with nothing but that available light…
Well…that was easy…now what else can we do?!! The bedroom was pretty opulent complete with a nice, velvet wallpaper…
…and I also brought a lavender seamless that I could drop for a variation…
…that looked like this…
I think we’re ready to go! And as cute as Robert was, I knew Enya would bring a bit more to the table…
Next we pulled the seamless outta the way, added a pillow from the bed for her to lean on and pulled back a lot on the clarity to soften things up…this is how it looked…
Now let’s move onto the windows…
You’ll notice that I got rid of those windows across the street…it just makes everything look a lot cleaner and more elegant.
And here’s the page from today’s Wall Street Journal…
Thanks to Dana for the great shoot…and thanks to Enya for letting me turn her suite into a studio for an hour!
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OK…let’s get this outta the way right off the bat…
No, I did not get tickets to Hamilton!
Now…on with the show……
My string of extremely cool shoots for Arrive Magazine continued when Rob Smith offered up Lin-Manuel Miranda for a cover feature on the ‘Hamilton’ writer and star. The story was tied to the productions donation of 20,000 $10 tickets to High School students so they see private matinees of ‘Hamilton’ that also includes a Q&A with the cast afterwards. It’s all done with the hope that it will get students to enjoy learning history…and what better way to get teens to enjoy history than to have them rapping the incredibly infectious songs from the musical after they leave the theater?!! And for one of our main photos we would be shooting Lin-Manuel with a group of students!
There were of course the usual difficulties of a shoot like this…very limited shoot time…having to do a union call which besides being crazy expensive, meant we couldn’t even plug in a light or move as much as a clamp without having a Hamilton crew member do it for us…to not even knowing what kind of wardrobe Lin-Manuel would be wearing before he arrived. Then there was the fact that I had a wild chest cold that made me feel like death and took 90% of my voice away! But hammer on we must…
On the location scout we decided on a few locations…
A view from the stage for our shot with Lin-Manuel and the kids…
The back wall of the stage for a portrait…
And a corner up in the mezzanine that would work great for our cover…my editor Leigh Flayton was giving her acting chops a workout…
The ‘Hamilton’ wine being served in the Mezzanine Bar…
Since we are going to have very little time for our shots, we had to pre-light each shot in advance…that was a lotta light! We had three separate setups on the stage alone, as well as the cover we were doing up in the mezzanine…
Most of these lights were for the opening shot of Lin-Manuel with the kids…
But you can see the setup against the ‘rope wall’ in the background…
Rob and I checking out the opening shot…with some of the union crew approving in the back…
Here’s our first shot with stand ins for the opener…
…and how things got looking better when the ‘talent’ showed up…
But once we got the lighting dialed in a bit more, the final shot for the opener dazzled…
Next was our ‘rope wall’ shot. Since Matt and Lin-Manuel were about the same height, he got to be the stand in…
Then we dropped a seamless for a tight portrait. I wanted something a little darker and moodier, so we kept things pretty contrasty…and I tweaked the color way into the blue spectrum which made Matt’s baby-blues even dreamier than normal…
For Lin-Manuel I backed off a bit cuz I liked the shadow we were getting on the background…
Finally, we raced upstairs for the cover. It’s pretty hard to describe how tight this location was, and unfortunately we didn’t have the time to do any behind-the-scenes shots, but Lin-Manuel was stuck into the corner and I was no more than four feet away shooting between the railing of a very dark stairway with the widest lens I had!
Once again, I chose to shift the color balance towards the blue end of things since I didn’t really like how the dead green/cyan of the wallpaper was looking. I also popped the saturation of the gold quite a bit in CaptureOne which really made those frames stand out…
And here’s how it all turned out…
And I wasn’t kidding earlier…I still haven’t seen ‘Hamilton’…..but these kids did!!!
I got an email this afternoon reminding me that ‘The Human Face of Big Data’…Rick Smolan’s look at how the rapid emergence of digital devices is affecting our lives…will be airing tonight at 10:00PM Eastern on PBS (check local listings). And that reminded me that I actually did one of the shots that was featured in the book. Rick had me shoot Josh Koppel, the CEO of ScrollMotion…an App developer that has created mobile content for most of the world’s largest publishers. ScrollMotion basically ‘teaches’ Old Media how to use New Media. The funny thing is that when you enter their offices, it’s like going to a museum of Pre-Digital Technology! Every single inch of the wall space is filled with magazine cover, record albums, movie posters and newspaper clippings…
…and especially Josh’s office…
My mission was clear…show what the place was like and the rest would fall in place. We figured that couch with the wall full of Nostalgia behind it was the place to start. Since Josh lives on his iPad, I wanted to play that off the wall of old printed material. But I needed to make the iPad the hero. It kind of had to be the focal point of the photo. It had to shine…and I had just the right thing…my little battery powered Morris Mini Slave units…
The Mini Slaves are small…really small…and if he held one in his hand at just the right angle it would appear that the iPad was lighting his face while also giving me a nice halo-glow. This is how we set it up…
I did a lot of cross-filtering with CTO and CTB tells to add to the mood. The Ring Light and Mini Slave were both wrapped in blue, while the beauty dish had a full CTO to warm up his skin and the wall behind him. There was a huge wall of windows on the left side that also let a lot of cool, blue light in. My first test was kind of right on…
Once we added Josh to the shot, all we had to do was get him to master holding the Mini Slave in the right place…
Here’s the final image in the book…
So anyway…you should check out the documentary tonight…watch the trailer here:
Click on any image for Full-Size
In the last episode of ‘Damn Ugly Photography’, we took a look at the first week of the 2016 Barron’s Roundtable Shoot…but now I’m gonna show you how I convinced our nine financial professionals to act as stand-ins for Tom Cruise in his movie, ‘The Minority Report’. You remember…this one…
Adrian Delucca and I had been tossing ideas around for months on how to make this work. I had to generate the floating graphs and other graphics that would be ‘moved around’, and we also had to come up with the perfect background images to position the people against…
…but probably the hardest thing would be how we could quickly get each Roundtable member to understand exactly what the final image would be and how to get them into position. Remember…I have less than ten minutes with each person and I had to shoot two other setups besides this one! I figured the smartest way around this would be to show them a pretty detailed mockup of our cover ideas with one of my assistants standing in, so on our setup day, I had Robert work his magic…
The lighting was super-simple…just a single Profoto 3′ RFI Octa bank way up high on a boom…and a couple of medium strip skim lights with blue gels to mimic the lighting from the background…
And the night before the shoot, I quickly Photoshopped this together…
Showing each person the print before we got started proved to be the exact thing they needed to illustrate what we wanted them to do…
Now we just had to get them to do their best impression of Marcel Marceau without feeling too self conscious…
Point up at the graph…uhhhh….hand…..
Here are a few of the raw images…
And now comes the fun part…editing through the 1000 images I took to find the few I can use that will actually look like everyone was in the same place at the same time. Then, floating all the graphs in place while remembering I had to save lotsa room for cover headlines. Here’s how the Week Two cover came together…
First, the background image…made a bit fuzzier for perspective…
Now, add the people…
Then, the basic graphs…
Now I had to add in some shadows, haloes and color shifts to the graphs so they looked like the were actually floating in space…
Next I pasted in a few techie-looking graphics and charts…
I decided to tone down the blue of the background cuz it as taking away from the overall dark mood I was aiming for…
And finally I increased the contrast, desaturated the skin tones and added a glow around the fingertips…
Our final cover…
Using the same steps, I worked up another image for the opener…
The Week Three images came together pretty much the same…
For the final steps, I messed with the focus on the background cuz it was drawing attention away from the foreground and shifted the overall blue cast more towards cyan/green…
Here’s the Week Three cover…
…and the opener…
Now if all that Photoshop geek talk hasn’t put you to sleep and you’re hankerin’ for more, you can watch the layers progressions on both cover images in these two YouTube videos…and then I promise, no more Roundtable talk for a while…..
Week Two Cover Layers:
Week Three Cover Layers:
Click on any image for Full-Size
As anyone who has visited Damn Ugly Photography on a regular basis knows, the first week of January is when we decamp for the warm embrace of the Harvard Club to shoot the annual Barron’s Roundtable. This year was no different, and apart from there being a few familiar Roundtable members missing and replaced with a couple of new guys, the formula remains the same. We have two hours to shoot each of the nine Roundtable members…separately since they all arrive at staggered times…with the objective being that we need enough varied poses to fabricate four individual covers (three in January and one more for the mid-year report in June) as well as four feature photos to open the story with each week. We start at around 8:00AM and have to be totally done by the time the meeting begins at 10:00. If the thought of shooting nine people for four covers and four openers in two hours isn’t daunting enough, we also have to get each Roundtable member to wrap their head our concepts for the covers immediately…and remember…these aren’t models. They’re financial professionals. Trying to get them to understand the varied poses I need so that I can manufacture a cover where they all look like they’re relating to each other is harder than any of the technical tricks we work on!
So here is how the shoot for the first week’s cover went…
Our Week One cover and opener revolved around this image of a World Map…
Using some old images of the Roundtable members from a previous shoot, I put together this comp…
…so when people arrived, I could quickly show them a visual representation of what we were going to do…
As usual, we have to set up multiple lighting sets for our different poses in a very small room…this time we had three individual sets…
…everything is in the same place…hair & makeup, three sets and a very small area where people can hang out until we get them on set…
For the cover, we wanted everyone to react to the people around them…people who weren’t there when we did the shoot…so Robert got to carry on imaginary conversations to get each persons attention aimed in the right direction…
We did luck out once when Bill Priest and Brian Rogers overlapped, so we shot them together…
…but for the most part, they had to wave their hands around like a weatherman in front of a green screen…
So my raw materials from this part looked like this…
Now I just had to pick the appropriate images where everyone looked like they were all together at the same time. Here’s how the cover got pieced together…
First, the base background image…
Next, the base image is flipped to make the floor, and I also de-focussed it so it looked more like a real reflection…
Now I could mess with the color & contrast for the combined background…
…and add a few people…
…and the rest follow…
…and finally, I added shadows and more color & contrast tweaks…
…which gave us our cover for Week One…
Now I could move on to the inside feature image. I stated with the same base image layer, but I destaurated the blue cast a bit and lightened the upper area so that we could overlay type onto it easier…
The inside poses needed to be a bit more serious, due to the recent instability of the markets…
The ‘assembled’ group…
…the final image with shadows & color alterations…
…and our opening feature image…
So that was Week One. Tune in again next week to see how Adrian Delucca, Pam Budz and I put together Week Two & Week Three!
All of us here are Damn Ugly Photography hope you have a wonderful holiday season…and we’ll see you next year!
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Ronnie Weil from the Wall Street Journal recently called me up and asked if I wanted to add Julian Fellowes to my Rogues Gallery. The English actor, novelist, film director, screenwriter and member of the House of Lords…so that actually makes him Lord Julian Fellowes…was in town for the Broadway opening of the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, ‘School Of Rock”. Lord Fellowes wrote the book for the musical. That’s right…the same guy who won an Oscar for ‘Gosford Park’ and got crazy famous for coming up with ‘Downton Abbey’ was now gonna turn the Jack Black goofball comedy into a Larger than Life Andrew Lloyd Webber musical!
So what was I gonna do?!!
He’s English…offer him some Tea!!!
And it’s a Rock & Roll musical, so I gotta get a guitar. I shot Gabrielle Sterbenz right after she picked up her shiny, white Stratocaster and I knew it would be the perfect prop for a fine English gentleman in a bespoke suit…
Now I just had to get prepared. Lord Fellowes would have very little time once he got to the studio. He was coming from a morning TV appearance and had an interview immediately afterwards. So Matt and I set up a couple of tastily lit portrait situations…
As good as Matt looked, Julian just added a bit more panache…
And to my surprise, he took to the guitar idea immediately…
Next we moved over to the full-length seamless…
…but now we added the Tea Cup with Gabby’s Strat…
And our job was complete!
Thank you, Lord Fellowes…I can hardly wait to see ‘School Of Rock’…and for the final season of Downton!
Patti Smith.
That’s all Rob Smith…the Art Director of Arrive Magazine…said when he called me a few months back.
Patti. Motherfucking. Smith.
I said “Yes!” before he even had time to get another word out. Are you kidding? Of course I wanna shoot Patti Smith! Besides adding to my current string of portraits of iconic women…Judy Collins, Gloria Steinem, Misty Copeland…Patti is someone I have always been fascinated by, and having the opportunity to shoot her would be a dream! The shoot would be tied in with the release of her new book, M Train. But then Rob had more to add…
No Hair and Makeup…
No Styling…
We’d get half an hour from the time she arrived at the studio…not a second more.
Fine..done…it would be a challenge, but I didn’t care…let’s get on with it!
I originally booked a studio in Long Island City because it had lots of character…but a week later Patti’s publicist nixed it saying Patti didn’t want to cross the river. She said Patti lived in the West Village and that she liked shooting at Industria. OK…less character, but if it makes Patti happy, we’ll book Industria. So more than a month goes by and it’s now about a week before the shoot date and I call the publicist and ask if we’re still on track to shoot and if we can confirm the studio…“Sure…we’re all set!”, she says…and I confirm Industria. But then a few days later…only three days before our shoot…she calls back to say that Patti now doesn’t want to shoot in a studio…she wants to do the shoot at Penn Station! She apparently had written a lot of her book while riding the Acela train and liked the metaphor of shooting at Penn Station since we were shooting for Amtrak’s magazine. But besides the fact that canceling Industria meant we would lose about $2 Grand…exactly how were we gonna shoot in the departure lounge of the busiest train station in America on three days notice?!! Without getting into detail, I’m just gonna fast-forward past the conference calls, begging and hand-wringing that ensued, and say that somehow we were given permission. And so on an extremely hot August afternoon, myself and my crew took over Penn Station…
Patti wanted the Departure Board…she gets the Departure Board…
…but even though I lost my studio aspect of the shoot, I figured we could still set up a smallish backdrop off to the side…
The two areas were only a few feet apart, but the Penn Station folks were still kinda freaked out when they saw the size of our setup!
But I didn’t care…I was shooting Patti Smith, dammit!
Now let’s move over to that backdrop…
And then…just as we were pretty much finished…something truly magical happened…
Those kids sticking their heads around the corner might be the best happy accident I’ve ever photographed.
For one final setup, I pulled back the curtain to show the overall set and exactly where our little popup studio was…
Here’s how everything looked in ‘Arrive’…
So even though we were thrown more curveballs than I had seen in a year, everything worked out in the end…
Hey kids…this coming Monday, November 9th…Mr. Damn Ugly will be taking over the Apple Store in SoHo (103 Prince Street at Greene Street) as the next speaker in the APA Image Maker Lecture Series. I’ll be dropping plenty of bon mots about what actually happens on my shoots, complete with lots of behind-the-scenes juice and info on the post-processing that goes into making my final images.
Check out the APA NY Facebook Events Page where you can sign up if you wanna go…and it’s 100% free! And as an added incentive, they tell me there’s gonna be a post-Image Makers Talk Networking Happy Hour hosted by the folks at APA NY.
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Over the years, my association with the Wall Street Journal has allowed me to photograph quite a few truly amazing personalities…Tony Bennett, Judy Collins, Penn Jillette and Willem Dafoe…just to name a few, and the string continues with my recent shoot with writer, journalist, activist and all-round cool lady, Gloria Steinem. The Journal’s ‘Mansion’ section was profiling her about the release of her book…‘My Life On The Road’…where among other things, she recalls her early life crisscrossing the country in her family’s Airstream. When I arrived, I found a pre-release copy next to her bed…complete with an editing pen…
This was my second time photographing Gloria…the first being for BusinessWeek back in 2001…
…and just as back then, my assigning Photo Editor was Ronnie Weil, who came along on the shoot and got to act as Gloria’s stand in…
Where else to start but in Gloria’s bedroom?!!
…which gave us the photo that opened the story…
For our second portrait, we turned to her living room, where the years she spent in India shows through in her decorating style…
Another iconic day…thanks to Ronnie…
…and of course, thanks to Ms. Steinem…
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DW Gibson is a writer and journalist whose work appears in publications like the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Village Voice & The Daily Beast and is also a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. And over the past few years, he’s written extensively about New Yorkers who’ve been affected by gentrification. Here’s a little behind the scenes of my shoot for WirtschaftsWoche…one of my European clients…when they asked if I could shoot him in his own rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn…
Kaz and I started with a pretty simple setup in between DW’s house and his next door neighbors. I liked the way the design of the houses showed the type of architecture the neighborhood was comprised of, and it also allowed me to do one of my ‘Artificial Portraits’, since my editor at WiWo had specifically asked me to do at least one setup that showed my lighting kit…
Did I mention it was about 100 degrees the day we were shooting? DW was very gracious and offered beer to keep us cool…
Next, we crossed the street for a couple of portraits against a brick wall…
…and finally finished off with some views of his street…
…which opened our story…
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I had so much fun shooting Judy Collins for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that they decided to send me uptown to shoot her at home for the ‘House Call’ column in the ‘Mansion’ section. Here’s how the day went…
Judy lives in a fabulous Pre-War apartment that immediately gave us a few locations to choose from…
I wanted to keep the look and feel of the apartment without relying on too much lighting, so we figured using my DIY Ghetto-Flo Lights was the way to go. This way we could just drop in a bit of accent lighting where we needed it, but use the great available light that poured into the apartment. Here are the results…
…and the final image used in Mansion…
Thank you, Judy…until our next shoot…
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Misty Copeland’s new website just went live, and there are a surprising number of Damn Ugly photographs taking up space…
I’ve been working with Lisa Clayton at Starving Artist Web Design who did all the heavy lifting with the layout of the new site…especially the inventive way she Photoshopped that swirling red skirt onto my shot for the home page…Bravo!!!
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Bill Nighy is cool. Throughout the meandering flow of his career he’s played a vampire, a wizard, an aging, sleazy burnout rock star, a nazi, a time traveler and even Davy Jones with an Octopus face! Whatever he’s in, he’s the coolest guy on the screen. And he wears a suit really well, too. When he arrived at the Golden Theater…where he was starring in Skylight with Cary Mulligan…for our Wall Street Journal shoot, he just oozed cool…that bespoke suit, his perfect diction, his silky smooth attitude…I thought to myself…he’s the King of Cool.
And…off we go…
The mezzanine of the Golden had lotsa space for Julien and Kaz to assemble our pop-up studio…
And a quick 45 degree turn to the left offered up a wonderful second shot…
Here’s how everything turned out…
I wanna be cool like Bill…
I am quite honored and humbled to announce that my portrait of Willem Dafoe for the Wall Street Journal was included in this years Communication Arts Photo Annual…
Thanks to photo editor Ronnie Weil for thinking of me such a plum assignment, art director Keith Webb for his elegant layout and writer Alexandra Wolfe for her always eloquent words.
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A while back, Mr. Delucca called me up and asked it I wanted to do another fashion piece for Penta, Barron’s Quarterly lifestyle magazine. The feature was on Paul Smith and he wanted to do the shoot at the Paul Smith store in SoHo. After I checked out the store, I came away thinking it would be kind of fun to do all the shots he wanted to do…but in one photo. So I put on my David Hockney hat and devised a way to shoot our model in three positions at the entrance to the showroom for a deconstructed fashion photo. After popping off 848 individual shots (and why I used my Hasselblad/Leaf back is a mystery cuz now I have over 50gb of raw files to archive forever!) this is the result…
And here is the final image in Penta…
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It’s June, and that means I hafta jump back on the Photoshop Horse and put together another cover story using elements from our January shoot of the Barron’s Roundtable members for the Mid-Year Issue. Adrian Delucca and I thought it might be fun to once again make use of those very expensive Bull and Bear costumes we had made for the 2014 cover, but this time the idea would be to have our mascots walking hand-in-hand down Wall Street. Sounds easy. It isn’t. For a whole mess of reasons, shooting ‘live’ down on Wall Street was never gonna happen. Forget about the expense of shooting this type of thing on location, just try to shoot on Wall Street when there aren’t a million people milling around! No…this was gonna be much more manageable shot in pieces…
First off, we had to shoot a ton of variations of the Bull and Bear in the studio that I could drop into my Wall Street photo. To save a few bucks on models, Adrian and Assistant Photo Editor Jenna Bascom elected to get all sweaty in the mascot suits…
…how about a ‘selfie’?!!
Next, I had to shoot our empty Wall Street scene. Shooting on weekdays were out, since Wall Street folks are already filling up lower Manhattan before the Sun rises, so that meant an early morning weekend shoot. Almost every weekend of March and April was either too damned cold or rainy (or on one Saturday when I arrived at 6:00AM, the street was filled with Jodie Foster, George Clooney, Julia Roberts and about 200 grips setting up a film shoot!), but I finally got off a few frames of a relatively empty street and Stock Exchange building…
Now I had to get rid of any people and other extraneous crap out of the background and stretch it out a bit (and make it square) to fit Barron’s format…
…then throw the buildings a bit out of focus for perspective…
But the early morning grey look wasn’t working, so I sparkled things up a bit…
And it was finally ready for our Bull and Bear…
Throw in some final color & contrast adjustments, a few shadows and more Photoshop magic…and voila!!!
For the cover images, besides the portraits we did for the Chess theme, we quickly shot a few individual portraits of each Roundtable member on a neutral seamless…
…a quick Photo-Bomb…
The idea was to insert them into Financial District street scenes…here are a few of the results…
Mario Gabelli:
Marc Faber:
Bill Gross:
…and the final cover…
And we’ll do it all again next January!
So a few Microsoft engineers cooked up a demo website called How Old Do I Look? where you can upload any photo showing a face and the system will try to guess the age and gender of the person in the shot…
I uploaded my ‘Damn Ugly’ photo…
Sixty-Six?!! Microsoft assholes…I’m sticking with Apple!!!
Damn Ugly Photography 