Last weekend I had a nice spread published in the London Sunday Times…Andrea Jung, the CEO of Avon…
Some Damn Ugly Photography
News from my photo shoots
Palm Beach + July = Very, Very Hot !!!
Click on any image for Full-Size!
Back in July, Eric Godwin, the Photo Director at Bloomberg Markets magazine, asked me to head down to Palm Beach to photograph Chris Cline, a billionaire Coal Baron and head of Foresight Energy, one of the country’s largest producers of coal. As you can imagine, Palm Beach in July is just about as hot as a coal furnace, but with added humidity! Add to that our location…Cline’s 164-foot yacht, ‘Mine Games’…and we were in for a hot time in Florida!
Kaz and I got in a day early and on our scout we immediately were made aware of the quirks of trying to photograph a portrait using a prop as big as a yacht…the boat was in a rather tight slip with very little room to maneuver for good angle and the boat itself…while certainly large and luxurious…offered few spots to do the kind of shots I had in mind. But a couple of locations did jump out…
…this spot…shot from inside a hedge and through a bunch of tall grass…would let me stack up the boat behind him.
…and I thought it could be almost regal having him descending this staircase…
And I guess the Art Director was thinking the same thing when he named the story, “New King Coal”…..
One thing became very apparent as soon as the sun rose in the sky…since the entire deck was gleaming, shiny white…even slathered up with an SPF-50 sunscreen, my white ass was gonna fry like a lizard on a rock in the desert! I spent a lotta time re-greasing myself during the day and did a good job of not turning into a human lobster, but there was one place I neglected to coat…the inside of my nostrils! All that sun bouncing up and into my nose gave me the most excruciating sunburn I can remember, so for any of you who may have seen me after I got back from that trip with a finger up my nose…furiously scratching away…now you know why!
Big Jet Engines
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A couple of weeks ago, Adrian DeLucca at Barron’s asked if I wanted to shoot a cover story featuring Louis Chenevert, the CEO of United Technologies…the only problem was, United Technologies didn’t want to let Louis leave the office and go play with any of the cool toys UTC makes…like the really Big Jet Engines that I knew they had sitting at the Pratt & Whitney plant right across the river from their corporate headquarters in Hartford! But after a little back-n-forth with the folks in corporate communications at the company, I convinced them that since I had shot at UTC many times in the past and I knew the offices were Death on Toast…very functional, but not exciting in the least…a location scout was in order! And after only five minutes of poking around the Testing Facility Hanger, this was what I found…..
Now all three locations would be perfect for both my cover and the opener for the story, but the problem was, we were only going to get Louis for ten minutes…tops…..and he was showing up at 8:00AM, surrounded by assistants and P/R guys whose main mission in life was to make sure I didn’t get a second longer than what was promised! That meant Kaz and I would have to set up everything the night before and for the shoot, move our subject from shot to shot quicker than we have had to do in a long time. Here’s how things looked…..
Fun At The Fair!
Yesterday I channeled my inner farmer and hit the Harwinton County Fair, complete with ox-pulls, carnival rides, corn dogs and a whole mess of chickens and horses and cows and bunnies! My iPhone (set to ‘Hipstamatic’, of course!) has recorded some choice bits for you to enjoy…
Killer Attack Rooster…
Very Friendly Horse…
Sleepy Bunny…
Tiny Donkey…
Girls Sitting With Cows…
Terrifying Rides…
Whac-A-Mole…
Dead Guys…
…And The Best Damned Potatoes You’ve Ever Seen!!!
Now I know that still pictures hardly do justice to a good carnival ride, but if you watch this video long enough, it might generate enough vertigo to make you sick….
Do you feel like judging a few chickens?!!
Not a fan of chickens? Then how about braving the crowds to look at the prize-winning bunnies?!!
And if all that wasn’t enough fun for ya, The Flying Wallendas were even on hand cheating death for the 7,496th time!!!
New Work – Robert Nardelli
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My tour of the nation’s boardrooms continued last week when I got to spend some time with Bob Nardelli, the ex-CEO of Home Depot and Chrysler, who is now at Cerberus Capital Management, one of the largest private equity investment firms in the country. His new gig has him running the Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company…a little portfolio that includes about 50 companies with combined revenues of nearly $50 billion. With that as his day job, it’s not too surprising that I was not going to be given a lot of time to do what I do, but I was further hamstrung when the location I wanted to shoot him in was deemed ‘too public’ and instead my only choice was…the boardroom.
The boardroom is always the first place I’m shown and usually the last place I wanna be! The person giving me the office tour typically says, “We’ve done a lot of photography in here!”, which makes me wonder why they think I would want to go where thousands have gone before, but beyond that, most boardrooms are just not that photo-friendly. They can be High-Tech or Old-World and as well-designed as possible, but there’s no gettin’ around the monstrously large table that inevitably takes up the bulk of the room. And even the best boardroom is usually kinda bland, overlit and without much drama. So to overcome these little obstacles I decided to get a bit dark and moody and make a shot that was more cinematic than real…..
…then, for a quick secondary photo, I decided to do one of my Artificial Portraits (above) that I could also serve as a nice setup for a tight portrait…..
Are Y’All Ready For An 80mp Digital Back ?!!
Barely a week after I was pissing and moaning about the big announcement from PhaseOne that they were introducing a $42,000 digital back that captures only Black & White images, comes today’s bombshell from Leaf that they’re gonna now about to trot out has to be to most ridiculous bit of technological overkill yet seen on the digital landscape…an 80MP digital back that kicks out a 165mb RAW file and…ya might wanna sit down for this…a 480mb TIFF file! Now for those of you who understand such things, then you know that by starting with a base TIFF of 480mb, your final layered, retouched & messed-with file can easily end up being larger than TWO GIGABYTES in size!!! For those less geek-savvy, let’s just agree that the file size this thing produces is waaaaaay bigger than just about anybody needs, wants, asked for or even thought would be necessary! With resolution like this I would imagine you could stand on top of a tall building in New York and take a pretty sharp picture of Boston (I kid, of course!), but no…the number one reason Leaf claims this thing is necessary is to “eliminate Moiré and more perfectly render objects – from the texture of fine fabrics to the smooth curves of car metal”…! Now you’ll hafta excuse me whilst I digest that statement, because I’m on my third Leaf back and with each new back Leaf has made the exact same claim…and I still have Moiré! Oh…not so much that it makes any real difference and what there is can usually be eliminated with a bit of Photoshop fuckery, but I hafta ask…just what is the new 80mp Aptus-II 12 with its’ newly designed 53.7×40.3mm full-frame CCD sensor really good for besides forcing its’ owner to buy stock in companies that manufacture hard drives?!!
Just for kicks, I took the last job I did with my ‘Old Skool’, 33MP Leaf Aptus 75S and ran the numbers to see what the difference in storage would be if I shot the same job on the new Aptus-II 12. I shot 307 RAW files, each one of which is 68.3 megabytes in size, that translated into 20.97 gigabytes of total space used, and quite frankly, that’s already a huge pile of ‘zeroes’ and ‘ones’ filling up disc space! However, the same 307 RAW files shot on the Aptus-II 12 with its 165 megabyte capture rate will give you a 50.66 gigabyte meatball that you have to store on multiple redundant backups systems until they plant your dead ass in the ground! That’s a lotta gigabytes, Baby!
Oh yeah….the Aptus-II 12 is gonna come in at about $32 Grand, just in case you wanted to start saving up your pennies now…..
iPhone Photo of the Day
And Now… A Digital Back For ‘Pure B&W Images’…?!!
The steady march of technology in the photo biz often makes my head spin, especially with the price of admission factored in, but this mornings email from PhaseONE even made me take a deep breath. For the mind-bending sum of $41,990.00, photographers can now enjoy a ‘pure’ digital Black & White experience with the release of the new 39 Megapixel PhaseONE Achromatic+ Back. That’s right…42 Grand and you can only shoot B&W! Now I don’t wanna seem too Old Skool here, but if ‘regular’ digital backs are having such a hard time capturing Black and White images, couldn’t we just load in a roll of Tri-X like the old days and be happy? Was there really that big of an outcry from the photo community for a piece of equipment that essentially moves the medium backwards?!! I’m not saying I don’t love Black & White imagery…far from it…but spending 42 Large on a digital back is sort of like inventing a High Definition Video Camera that only shoots silent movies! And yes…Phase is touting the scientific applications of such a back as one of the main reasons for going forward with such a project, but you just know there are gonna be a lotta kids with messed up priorities who will have the Achromatic+ on their wish list this Christmas!
Don Draper Wins A Clio? Big Deal…I’ve Got A Clio!!!
OK…so on Sunday night, just as ‘Mad Men’ was lassoing its third consecutive Emmy for Best Dramatic Series, I was over on AMC watching that nights episode where our hero, Don Draper, wins his first Clio Award (and the apparent pain & suffering that comes with the honor). Well, maybe pain & suffering is a bit strong, since as Don does a victory lap around a bar with his trophy, all the gals in attendance are clamoring to spend the night with him! And that’s when it hit me…wait a second…..I have a Clio, and the damned thing has never managed to get me the ladies like it did for Don!!! I kinda think I got a raw deal…….or maybe I just need a tailored suit, a high & tight haircut, and a skinny tie!
There Are No Words…..
Nothing I say could possible add to the luminous beauty of this famous album cover by gospel singing trio The Faith Tones, so let’s all just sit back and enjoy, shall we?!!
You Mean You Can’t Use A Canon 7D For The Remake Of ‘War & Peace’…?!!
I love these xtranormal.com animations!
I Shoot Kaz…Kaz Shoots Me…..
A few weeks ago, the folks at Resource Magazine got in touch with me and asked if I would be interested in contributing to a photo essay they’re doing on Photographers and their Assistants. The idea is for me to shoot a portrait of my assistant and then have the assistant shoot me. I thought it sounded like an OK way to spend a day, so on one of the hottest days of the year, Kaz and I trucked a few hundred pounds of gear up to the roof and I did one of my Artificial Portraits of him, then we went back to the air-conditioned comfort of my apartment where he did a particularly scary shot of me…
The story will be in the Fall issue which comes out in early October…I’ll let y’all know when it drops!
How’d You Do That?!!
Click on Any Image for Full-Size
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Ever since I posted THIS Song of the Day last week, I’ve been getting e-mails from photo geeks around the World asking me about the shot of Kate Tucker in that field. I’ve had more theories tossed my way than I ever could have imagined, from the type of lighting…did I use an HMI spotlight or studio strobes or small, battery-powered flash units…to whether or not Kate was even in the field…a lot of you actually are convinced she was shot in the studio and stripped into a stock field shot! All of this speculation knocked me out, especially since the truth is that it was a kind of a throwaway that neither Kate or I thought was working, so we bailed on it and moved on to another idea after only five or six frames!
So…for your photo-geeky viewing enjoyment…here’s a breakdown of the shot and the post-processing steps involved in making it look the way it does…
We shot this on the Hasselblad H1 with the Leaf Aptus 75 back which gave us this very normal, if a little flat, RAW file. To keep the lighting dramatic, the only light I used is that Profoto beauty dish (with a grid) you see above her head. It was powered by a Profoto 7B at about half power which nicely darkened the mid-day ambient light down to mimic twilight…
Next, I had to do a bit of cosmetic retouching and obviously the light boom and sandbag had to go, but since I grey-balanced the shot heavy on the blue side, I had to bring back the vivid red of the dress and yellow tone of the guitar. I also lowered the contrast and added a bit of shadow detail using the ‘Shadow/Highlights’ adjustment because I knew that a few steps down the line I would be amping up the levels and contrast a lot…
Now came some color correction. Leaf RAW files are inherently flat and need a lotta help to get the kind of color I like in my final images, and in this case, because of that very blue white-balance I did, I inserted a Color Adjustment Layer and added 20 Red to the shadows and 20 Cyan to the highlights…
…then I added a Selective Color Adjustment Layer and really increased the Blue and Cyan levels…
Next, I pumped up the contrast in the Curves and Levels Adjustment Layers…
…and the contrast went up even more when I duplicated the image layer, converted it to ‘Soft Light’ and applied a healthy dose of the High Pass filter set at a radius of 150 pixels…
With the higher contrast, the High Pass layer added a lot of drama, but I still felt I had to draw more attention to Kate, so in a final step I created a new Overlay Layer (filled with 50% grey) and I ‘burned’ down the horizon line, the grass on either side of her and a bit of the sky, then I dodged the grass directly around her to make more of a spotlight effect…
That’s it…a simple photo in only seven steps!!! And here are all of those steps…side-by-side…one final time…
AOL Shoot for The Hollywood Reporter
Click on Images for Full-Size
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Through a wonderful bit of logrolling, I recently added The Hollywood Reporter as a new client when Alysia Lew of AOL (who I met on my BusinessWeek shoot of AOL executives last Fall) got me to shoot David Eun, the new president of AOL Media and Studios. Here’s a little of what we did…
Kaz sitting in for the main shot…note the hanging cable from the light we clamped up in the ceiling…
…and the resulting final image…..
A new graffiti mural in the reception area…
…and David getting ready to attack the photographer…..
The original test from the ‘Monster Wall’ shot at the top of this post…
And finally, here’s how the magazine opened the story…..
Stop the $300 Permit Fee !!!
I’m gonna jump on my soapbox and make an appeal to all photographers who live or shoot in New York City. Today is the last day to register with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting to speak out at the hearing on June 3rd against charging fees for all still photography permits. Every editorial and advertising photographer uses the type of equipment that under current rules requires a film permit from the city and up until now those seeking a permit simply were required to carry $1,000,000 in liability insurance, but the new proposal is adding a non-refundable $300.00 ‘application’ fee for every time a permit is pulled to shoot! Given the razor-thin profit margins photographers are working with these days and the budget tightening our clients are faced with, a $300.00 permit fee will seriously hamper location shooting in the city.
I will be speaking on behalf of EP, ASMP, APA and NPPA, but the more photographers who get up and let their voices be heard, the better! If you’re available to to go the hearing being held June 3, 2010 at the 125 Worth Street Auditorium, you must register by TODAY…contact Dean McCann of the Mayor’s Office at 212-489-6710 or by e-mail at applicationfee@film.nyc.gov and if you can’t make the hearing, please vote “NO” on this online petition.
Damn Ugly Photography Gets Lit Up By The Strobist !!!
Damn Ugly hasn’t had this many hits in one day since he went to DC and photographed The President…and even then I don’t think the graph went that high! This morning, David Hobby, also known in photo circles as The Strobist, interviewed me last week and posted it on his blog at 8:00AM this morning….
Brad Trent on the Fake Reality of Portraits
His post today…and the launching of my new website…have resulted in a major traffic jam clogging up the interwebs! I could only hope and pray to get this kinda action on a daily basis, but since I’m trying to get people signed up for the Santa Fe Workshop Ronnie Weil and I are teaching, I’ll take whatever action I can get!
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!!! EDIT !!!
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Damn Ugly made it to the Top 100 Blogs of the Day on WordPress!!! #27…and climbing like a rocket!!!
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Drumroll Please !!!!!
The Redesigned Website Is Up !!!!!
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You’ve probably noticed my participation here at Damn Ugly has been sketchy recently, but after a couple of months of all-night design sessions, resizing images and portfolio editing, my new website is up & running!!!
This is the third website design I’ve put up and by far the best. Quite honestly, the format of this site is exactly what I would have wanted years ago, but the technology just wasn’t there. Until now I’ve been using a Livebooks design, but this time I worked with Rob Haggart’s web design company, ‘A Photo Folio’ to implement the changes and we went live over the weekend. While everything about the architecture of the site is new, I incorporated a lot of the basic design elements from my previous site in this new project.
The first major change you will see is that I’m no longer hamstrung with a single, small image window…the images are much higher resolution ands now dynamically resize as you change the size of your browser window, or…even better.…you can click the ‘Full-Screen’ button at the lower left of your monitor and view the biggest, sharpest possible images I can offer! Navigating with the Thumbnail view is also much faster since you can see larger thumbnail images and they pop up ten times faster than the Livebooks version ever did. And I really like being able to navigate forwards and back by simply clicking on the left or right of the image…as you roll your mouse over the image, a ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icon appears and you can click and go! You can also access the thumbnails by placing your mouse in the middle of the screen and clicking when the grid icon appears. I don’t even know why I’m explaining this because the site design is so intuitive it just seems natural! But if you have any problems getting around the site, just ask a five year-old…it’s been years since I’ve met a kid who couldn’t figure out the internet!
Finally, having these hi-rez images allowed me to add a couple of galleries that I plan to have a lotta fun with in the future. My ‘Artificial Portraits’ and ‘Light Tests’ will allow me to show more of those behind the scenes moments that normally get archived to a hard drive, but offer insightful looks at the nuts & bolts of my shoots.
So head on over to www.bradtrent.com and tell me what you think!!!
Brad Trent
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The iPad Portfolio Era Begins…
As some of you already know, the past couple of months have had me furiously redesigning my current website with the folks at APhotoFolio.com and yesterday Rob Haggart, Mr. APhotoFolio himself, informed me that they have become the first photography website company to deliver custom designed iPad sites, built using HTML5, for all of their customers. Check it out…
A Photo Folio – First To Deliver iPad Sites
As I sit here resizing TIFFS down to JPEGs for my new site, I hafta wonder if the next thing I’m gonna be doing is purchasing a carload of iPads to act as my portfolios?!! Given how labor intensive, not to mention expensive, printed portfolios can be, having everything on an iPad just might make sense! I dunno…it’s all very early in the game, but if I can get over not having a printed book of BIG prints to show an art director, who knows?!!
And now, here’s a quick look at a sample page from my new website, which will be up as soon as I finish resizing those damned JPEGs…
Click on image for Full-Size
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FUCK HOBOKEN !!!
OK…so we’re out in Hoboken freezing our asses off this morning and I decide to do a quick portrait of the guy I was shooting on the sidewalk outside of his building…and yes, I knew that maybe I would need a permit, but we were only gonna be out there for fifteen stinking minutes and besides, it wasn’t like we had a twenty-person crew and motor homes and generators….but of course, just as we were ready to get going a cop pulls up and barks out, “You gotta permit for this?!!”…”No”, says I, pleading blissful ignorance of the complex photography laws of the fine State of New Jersey (insert all the sarcasm you can muster), “…but do you think you could let us slide?”. You already know the answer to that one, and he tells me I have to go Police Headquarters and fill out an application…
Off I go, meandering through the pothole-ravaged roads of the square-mile hamlet only known because Sinatra was born here, but when I get to the Cop Shop they say I’m in the wrong place…I hafta go to City Hall! OK…I walk the two blocks to City Hall, but once there and after waiting fifteen minutes in line, the Town Clerk (a snottier jerkoff you will never meet!) tells me it’s the Police who approve all film permits and besides, it takes three days and there is a $700 fee!!! I explain my situation and that I’m not shooting a ‘Film’ and that I’m working for a magazine, not Dreamworks, but he could give a rat’s ass…he ain’t budging. So one more trip back to Cops where, you guessed it, they shoot me down in flames!
So the photo of Bo that sits at the top of this post is all I have to show of the dump beautiful town that is Hoboken!!! I suppose that if that asshole Town Clerk sees this, I just might get a bill for $700 since, technically, I did shoot there, but I’ll take my chances and simply avoid Hoboken for the rest of my time on Earth!
I’m Gonna Be Teaching At Santa Fe…
Mark your calendars kids, ‘cuz in July Mr. Damn Ugly is gonna be jetting off to teach a workshop at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops! Reid Callanan, the High Priest of Santa Fe, has invited Ronnie Weil and I to teach a week-long program called ‘The Editorial Portrait’…..an intensive class that will let us show a group of young photographers what it takes to shoot for an editorial client. We’re still figuring out the curriculum, but I’m getting tired already! I figure by the end of the week, if the students don’t have a very good idea of what it takes to be an editorial portrait shooter, they never will! The week will be a non-stop cycle of shooting and critiquing work…every day new assignments are given out and the students have to adapt immediately and come back with great imagery. I’m looking forward to kicking some young photographer ass!!!
The fun begins July 4th and you can read all about our workshop HERE!
Damn Ugly Photography 