Stuck on the West Side Highway…whipped out my iPhone and fired up the very groovy Photosynth panorama app…..
Camille digs traffic! (Click on the image to make it get big!)
Photography
Up On The Roof…
Early morning, up on a roof in midtown Manhattan…with some soccer balls…..
Larry Fink for Barron’s
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With over $3.7 trillion (not a typo…with a “T”) of assets under management, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, and CEO Larry Fink runs the whole ball of wax. And you would be right in assuming that posing for pictures is pretty far down his ‘To-Do’ list, so when Adrian asked me to shoot him for the magazine’s new ‘CEO Spotlight’ feature, I knew I would have precious little time and have to be nailed down and ready to go when he got to the set. The CEO Spotlight is formatted with the subject silhouetted onto the page and has to be shot on white seamless, but with few locations at BlackRock large enough for us to set up a mini studio, we decided to drop our paper right in a hallway on the executive floor. Enjoy…
Initial setup…
Add a couple of skim lights…
Insert CEO…
Change angles for a couple of variations…
Bake and serve…
9/12
I dunno about the rest of you, but yesterday really kinda did me in. The non-stop media barrage of 9/11 remembrances and videos brought everything back in all too lurid detail. It drove me down into the basement and I emerged with a couple of photographs I took back in 1984…up on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I would much rather remember what it was like the day I took these shots…
Here Come Da Judge, Here Come Da Judge…
Until recently, William B. Chandler III was a Federal judge in Delaware, serving on the Delaware Court of Chancery with the title of Chancellor. But then he retired as Chancellor and became a managing partner of the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and I got a call from Larry Gendron…Art Director at The Deal…asking if I could do a feature shoot with The Judge. Now Larry and I hadn’t worked together in years…ever since he was at Financial World Magazine…so I really wanted to impress him with a good job, but the offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, while very functional, aren’t gonna be featured in the pages of ‘Dwell’ any time soon. We were faced with a lot of beige walls and small conference rooms…but Kaz and I still came away with three situations that Larry liked so much he put the story on the cover!
We started with a view down a hallway…
…then moved into the Board Room for the opener…
…and finally, we stuck him in a corner of the Law Library for what ended up being the cover shot…
Sometimes You Just Gotta Have Fun…
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Scott Milleisen is not only the head of the sports banking group at J.P. Morgan Chase, he’s also a Managing Director at the bank, so getting him to do anything outta his comfort zone for a photograph wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve done lately, especially with somebody from J.P. Morgan Corporate Communications over my shoulder the whole time. But even though were were led up to the top floor of the J.P. Morgan World Headquarters on Park Avenue…
…the floor with more modern art on it’s walls than you’ll find at MOMA, but not one that exactly screams ‘SPORTS’ at you…I still wanted to tie in the sports angle to his business. And given that he regularly puts together gazzilion dollar deals funding sports teams, the idea of shooting him in front of the twin Warhol Marilyns (Steve Cohen picked up one Marilyn from Larry Gagosian for $80 million a while back!) just seemed right. All that was left to do was hand him a baseball bat and get him to take a few cuts at the ball I hung from a boom stand.
Next we went around the corner and did a simpler shot of him hamming it up with a football against a brushed steel wall…
…and of course he had to strike the Heisman pose!
Photo Editor Sarah Morse sent me on this one for Institutional Investor and it’s on the stands now.
I Love Chicago…
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If you haven’t already guessed from my lack of posts recently, this month has been kinda busy here at Damn Ugly. Sorry ’bout that, but the necessity to work often gets in the way of me filling up the interweb with bloggy bits. So to get back in the saddle, I’m offering a little love letter to Chicago, where we found ourselves last week. I’ve been to Chicago a million times, but I was struck this trip by how much the city has changed…and I don’t just mean because of that gigantic Seward Johnson sculpture of Marilyn Monroe on Michigan Avenue. No, the city just feels more vibrant and polished. From the abundance of public spaces to the overwhelming amount of new buildings dotting the downtown area, everything just has a fresh energy about it. And on the one afternoon that wasn’t busy shooting I had a bit of time to take it all in. Between the iPhone Panorama’s, Hipstamatic shots and some stuff I did on the Canon, I built up a nice little portfolio of my walk around the Loop…..
Remember the Wilco album, ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’?!!
I love that cover…and those buildings…
While I was looking upwards, I became momentarily fixated on streetlamps…
And yes…I know it’s very blue!
What a way to make a living…
Next, I ended up in front of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ at Millennium Park…
…and it’s Circus Funhouse Mirror appeal…
Walking back to the hotel I knocked off another iPhone PhotoSynth panorama along Wacker Drive…
…and some Hipstamatic prints…
And one last shot of Marilyn with a guy really happy to be in Chicago…
…and finally…back to New York…
MTV’s Beauty Academy Gets Damn Ugly
When she’s not applying powder & lip gloss to my subjects, Kelly Stedman…my good friend and makeup artist of the past 15 years…has been producing reality shows, and for quite a while she’s been trying to include me in one of her little projects. I have always declined because I don’t really have a desire to get thrown into some televised ‘reality’ drama, but last month she asked if I could help her out on a new show she’s doing for MTV on a Beauty School in New Jersey and I finally caved in and agreed to give it a go. The show follows hair stylists Thomas McKiver and Oscar Bond and a group of students at The Bond Academy. Thomas and Oscar put the kids through the paces, and as incentives the top students get to assist them on photo shoots. That’s where I come in. For the first shoot, my crew and I trucked out to Bloomfield NJ on one of the hottest days of the year to set up a fantasy hair shoot in a third-floor walk-up, un-airconditioned Salsa Dance Studio. Here is some of the fun that ensued…..
My assistants Vivian Alban and Alex Minkin stand in for the models…
Kaz and I on set…
Hair stylist Thomas McKiver checks how things are looking…
The video and sound crew guys…
Don’t stare at the hair…don’t stare at the hair…..
Try not to mix up the model’s names…
Tall, skinny models on set, please…
Happy models…
…and happy students…
And here is some of how it all looked in the end…
Lauren B…
Roz…
Behold the Power of Blogging!!!
All you regular readers of Damn Ugly will certainly recall how just last week I called out Apple on the little Photoshop mistake they let pass on the Apple Store website……well…surprise, surprise…I’m sure that because of the millions of hits my little blog post generated on their site, they must have figured out that even in tiny thumbnail photo-illustrations, reflections matter and…..they fixed it!!!
Who sez ya can’t fight City Hall??? Maybe I should take up a sword and fight Bloomberg and those bloody bike lanes next?!!
Photoshop Fail of the Day
Checking my Twitter feed this morning, I see that the eagle-eyed folks over at Design Informer (@designinformer) have spotted a pretty good Photoshop fail on Apple’s website…..
Still not seeing it? OK…that big red arrow is pointing to the reflection which clearly shows ‘i5’ and not the ‘i7’ of the Intel chip….rookie mistake!
Mola Likes Damn Ugly…
The guys over at Mola Soft Lights just noticed that I used a Demi to shoot Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren a while back, ‘cuz they just wrote about it on their blog…check it out HERE!
Cool Cover of the Day
A tres-cool, 3-D, moving cover by Mert & Marcus for ‘V’ Magazine…..
It’s Summer…Let’s Go Fishing!!!
A few weeks ago, Adrian asked if I wanted to head up the Turnpike to shoot a couple of fund managers…Ed Nicklin and Andy Knuth of the Westport Select Funds…for the Barron’s Mutual Fund Report. We were both hoping to get anything other than the usual office environment portraits and since the Westport offices were kinda on my way up to Damn Ugly’s weekend command center, I swung by to take a look around and right behind their building I found this…
It’s funny how one simple prop can get your juices flowing on a shoot, but as soon as I saw the plastic Adirondack chairs and the river location I knew we had something to play with. And I’m not usually one who tries to cram a metaphor down the reader’s throat, but when we found out that Andy and Ed kept fishing poles in the office and that they were known to ‘fish for good deals’ in the market, I couldn’t turn up the chance to turn these fund managers into sport fishermen!
Once that was done, Kaz and I set up a nice, relaxing scene next to a waterfront shed where the boys could kick back and enjoy the sunny day…..
…which gave Barron’s the perfect opener for the section…..
Damn Ugly Answers Five Questions…
The other day, Aussie photographer Morgana Creely sat down with Damn Ugly Photography (via email…cuz she’s in Melbourne!) and asked me Five Questions…you can check out the answers on Her Blog
Behind The Scenes At The 2011 Barron’s Roundtable PART THREE
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The year is half over and that means The Mid-Year Roundtable issue of Barron’s has hit the stands. I’ve already spilled the beans on some of some of what went down at the Harvard Club that cold day in January in PART ONE and PART TWO, and now comes the final story of how we shot the ten members of the Roundtable separately and put ’em all together into a cover, an inside opener and individual portraits that would accompany each of their stock picks.
Adrian DeLucca and I figured we would hammer home the Global theme we started in the January issue by shooting each person against a section of a World map and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to squeeze a few Artificial Portraits in at the same time. I photographed a giant map I picked up from IKEA and then printed it out in ten 40″ x 50″ sections that would serve as a backdrop for each individual portrait…..
Since we had precious little time to waste the day of the shoot, I decided to ‘map out’ who would be in front of which section ahead of time…..
I kept the lighting pretty simple…just a gridded 20″ Profoto beauty dish way up high on a boom and an on-camera ringlight…..
Because we were jumping between the two sets, I gave myself a few cheaters to remind me what my settings should be…..
Oh yeah…just about forgot…I added an over the shoulder fill in the form of an open-face Octalite…..
…all of which gave us ten images that I had to re-assemble into a map of the World…..
…which looked like this on the cover…..
…with a variation for the inside opener…..
But while I was shooting the images for the cover, I also had to come away with some individual portraits that were a bit different and that’s where the Artificial Portraits came in…..
…and these shots were peppered throughout the article…..
And another year of the Roundtable was in the can! So until next January, Photo Editor Adrian DeLucca, Art Director Pam Budz and yours truly wish you well!
Big Rubber Balls, Bright Blue Walls & Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots!
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A few weeks ago, Manuela Oprea, photo editor at BloombergMarkets, offered me a job that proved to be one of the more interesting business magazine gigs I’ve done in a long time…to shoot a cover story on Barry Silbert, the Founder and CEO of SecondMarket and some of the people that make up the largest secondary market exchange dedicated to creating liquidity for illiquid assets. Silbert came up with the idea for SecondMarket when he was an investment banker struggling to sell off pieces of the bankrupt Enron…he figured, “Wouldn’t it make sense if there was an organized marketplace, like eBay, where illiquid assets could be bought and sold?”. To me it all sounded ridiculously dry and boring. So much so that when I went up to scout the place I really wasn’t expecting any of the craziness that would follow…..
First off, the offices were painted in super-bright primary colors…
…people sat on big inflated rubber balls…
…they wrote all over the walls…
…and played ping pong and air hockey to relax and had toys and games everywhere! Including this inspiring throwback to my youth…the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots!
This ain’t your father’s stock exchange! And we were gonna have some fun!
We decided to use the bright colored walls of the reception area for the cover shot of Barry. Here’s what things looked like before we set up the lights…
And here’s what 6 lights and 5 Profoto packs will do to reality…
Next we went to work on that lime-green wall…
Which resulted in the opening spread for the story…
With Barry’s part of the shoot done, we moved on to the Green Lantern T-shirt wearin’ Chief Strategy Officer, Jeremy Smith, paired with the Uber-Traditional, buttoned-down Managing Director, Kevin O’Connor, over a nice round of Robot Boxing!
And the last shot of the day would be of Adam Oliveri, their Managing Director of Private Company Markets…
But we weren’t done yet. A few days later, Manuela called and said that the story would now include a sidebar on the venture capitalist who got SecondMarket off the ground…Lawrence Lenihan, the CEO and Managing Director of FirstMark Capital. While I was looking around for places to shoot him, I kinda barged in on lunch…..
…but it resulted in this rather tasty portrait…
But I really wanted to come away with a second shot, and the reception area had a nice feel to it…
…so after a bit of furniture moving, we did this…
And finally, to bring this endless story to a close, here’s 7 seconds of cell-phone video Manuela caught of me shooting Barry for the cover…
Mega-Investor Bill Ackman For Barron’s
$10.3 Billion Dollars. That’s the value of the funds run by Bill Ackman, the founder and CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management. When you’re in charge of that kinda money, even I know you probably don’t wanna spend a lot of time posing for pictures. But I had to shoot a cover for Barron’s and little problems like this weren’t gonna get the job done….
I went up for a location scout, but as is the case with most of the investment companies I’m tasked to photograph, where I can shoot is often extremely controlled. Pershing Square’s offices are very striking…42 floors above Central Park, ultra-modern, with white glass walls and a view most people would kill to shoot…but I didn’t really wanna do a ‘view’ portrait, and besides, I knew that Art Streiber had already done that picture for Portfolio Magazine a couple years back…and a lot of the other areas of their office we strictly off-limits because of SEC rules, so my choices were whittled down to these two spots…..
A possible cover location…
…and a second spot, in their kitchen, that had an repeated Op-Art view of a vintage print of the original Pershing Square…
Of course the two locations were on opposite sides of the floor, and of course we would have maybe ten minutes with Bill to get both photographs done! That meant setting up both shots ahead of time (with the ‘normal’ six tons of lighting gear!) and work fast. We started with the doorway shot…
…which gave Barron’s this for the cover…
And then were off to the kitchen for something a bit more relaxed…
And since we finished both shots so quickly, he even gave us another minute to re-set and blast off a few ringlight portraits, one of which sits at the top of this post.
Matter & Anti-Matter
Submitted Without Comment…
Do You Have Any Stronger Sawhorses For The Chairman?!!
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A few weeks ago, Mr. DeLucca asked if I would like to take a trip up to Herald Square to shoot Terry Lundgren, the President, Chairman of the Board, Director and CEO of Macy’s. “Yeah”, I said, “but only if I don’t hafta do some lame picture of him on the retail floor!”. Thus began our journey…
I went up to Macy’s for a quick location scout and was of course shown every square inch of the million square feet of retail space in the World’s Largest Department Store…none of which really interested me. What I really wanted to see was their display department…I had a kind of cool idea that required mannequins and such, but I got shot down on that one. I was then offered a look around their ‘Executive Offices’, which is normally the kiss of death, but in this case it proved damned inspiring. The floor dates back to the 1902 origin of the building and was stunning, but what really got me going was the Executive Dining Room. The walls were covered in frescos painted in the 1940’s that show views of the building as it looked back then…
But using the P/R guy as a stand in, I saw immediately that just dropping him in front of the wall was gonna be flat-footed and boring…..
I needed to raise him up and get him into the scene, and that was gonna take a lot of gear! (And since this was a Barron’s gig, I only had one assistant) So Kaz and I showed up early…we got to Macy’s three hours before the shoot…and proceeded to turn the dining room into a photo studio for real. Besides my usual two tons of lighting gear, we hauled in apple boxes, saw horses, a sheet of plywood and a 4 x 8 piece of white plexiglass and went about rigging a platform that would raise him up to the right height…
But we still had one final hurdle to get over…the P/R guy walked in while we were setting up and had concerns about our plastic saw horses….”Do you have any stronger sawhorses for the Chairman?!!”. I had to get up on the platform and dance a jig to convince him we were safe. And it was worth it…here’s the resulting page in Barron’s…
But I wasn’t done. My favorite image was actually like that set-up shot I sat in for. The much more dramatic, pulled-back view of Lundgren is now sitting at the front of my portfolio…
Damn Ugly Photography 