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Jim Grant, the publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is one of Wall Streets greatest critics, and Adrian Delucca had me head downtown to shoot him for a recent Barron’s feature. Jim’s office was pretty small, but an institutional yellow wall behind a doorway…
…and his wall of books…
…gave me what I needed for a couple of nice portraits…
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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…
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…..
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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!
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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…
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I could have subtitled this post “How To Make 10 People Appear Out Of Thin Air” cuz that’s kinda what we had to do with the inside shots for this years Barron’s Roundtable issue. It took a little arm-twisting, but I convinced Adrian that after all these years of assembling individual portraits of the Roundtable members into our fanciful group shots, this would be a perfect time to pull away the curtain…up to a point…and show a bit of the behind-the-scenes magic and Photoshoppery that is involved in making ten people look like they were actually in the same room at the same time. My idea was to do a pulled-back view of the cover image showing the lights, assistants and set dressing, as well as having some fun with the MacBeth color-checker while we were at it, much like what I do in the Light Test galleries on my website. But the truth was that we would still be tricking the viewer into thinking they were seeing a real look at the set, when in fact the entire shot was created in Photoshop!
You’ll remember from Part One that we shot everybody separately on the black velvet set…..
…but those shots weren’t wide enough for me to insert all ten people, so we cleared the set, widened the black velvet and shot a blank canvas for me to assemble the group shot with…
Unfortunately, even that area wasn’t wide enough, so I had to stretch it even further in Photoshop into this…
You’ll notice that besides making the velvet area wider, I also corrected the lens distortion by straightening the verticals and I also added a few A-Clamps to the crossbar holding the velvet. Now I could get to work filling in the lighting. I added a second hairlight boom, and three beauty dishes on the bottom of the frame…
…and then cloned in the posing table and some sandbags, four times…..
…which got us to the point where I could start adding bodies!
…and then get the whole gang together…
Now by this time, I had worked up a pretty complex file with more than 30 layers…
There were more than 25 image layers alone, with things like hands, shadows, tabletops, light booms, and various body parts overlapping and blending into one another…trust me, it’s a lot to keep track of!
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But after all the cloning and cropping and positioning and blending and color-correcting, this was the final image…..
…and here is how it looked in Barron’s…
Now I figure after all that, y’all should have the basics down for how to fake a big group, so I won’t bore you with another step-by-step breakdown of the two additional shots I put together for the following two shots, but here’s what we did for week two and week three of the Roundtable Reports…
Week Two:
Week Three:
So there you have it…for now! Remember, I still have the two situations we did for the Mid-Year cover to talk about, but not until June when it gets published!
OK…OK…there is this…….
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For the fifth year in a row, I got to photograph the ten investment professionals who make up the Barron’s Roundtable to illustrate the two cover stories the magazine runs on their predictions for the World financial markets. And just as we do every year, photo editor Adrian DeLucca and I brainstormed over fine wines and French food to come up with the best way to use the extremely limited time we are given to shoot everybody for the minimum of four separate uses the magazine has. In the roughly two hours we’re alloted (we have to shoot everybody before their day-long meeting begins) we have to come up with two covers…one for January and one for the mid-year June issue…as well as double-page opening shots for both issues, and still try to get individual photos of each person that can be used in stand-alone stories. That’s ten people…two hours……four different shots!
Since I can’t talk about anything we shot for the June Mid-Year cover until it is published, you’ll all just hafta make due with half of the story until then, but here’s the story on how the January cover went down…..
Since the Roundtable members generally talk about Global financial markets, Adrian and I thought to shoot a cover image where the Roundtable members would be sitting…somewhat God-like…at a round table that was actually the Earth, but because the focus of their discussions typically center on how things will effect the North American markets, we decided it was best to concentrate on the North American continent. The first thing I had to do was come up with a globe map that was both graphic and a quick read and something I could easily morph into a table top. A bit of Googling came up with this…
…and with a bit of Photoshoppery I was able to turn it into this…
That gave me the basic shape I needed to determine the camera height & angle so that I could make a cover mockup…
Because each person was to be shot separately and combined in post into the final group shot around the table, I needed a posing table that would give me the proper curve for them to lean into so that when I positioned each person, they would be sitting or standing at the correct angle and my Photoshop blending at our gigantic Earth Table wouldn’t look fake. For the posing stand, I simply cut a curved piece of plywood, painted it blue to match the color of the globe image and screwed it into some apple boxes. Once the basic physics of what angle and height to shoot the cover was planned out, we were ready to get down to business. Since we were scheduled to begin at 8:00AM Monday morning, we spent a leisurely Sunday afternoon setting up…
Just as last year, The Roundtable meeting was taking place at The Harvard Club, so our ‘studio’ was a room with walls covered in portraits of dead, rich white guys staring down at us. They were apparently ex-Presidents of Harvard, which is probably why they called it the Presidents Room. We quickly set up out cover set…a black velvet backdrop, the blue plywood posing table, and a pretty simple lighting setup of a 20″ Profoto White Beauty Dish main light, a second Profoto Beauty Dish as a blue moon-glowy hairlight (but this one is a Silver dish with a 20 degree grid and 2 Full Blue (CTB) filters attached) and a 4′ x 6′ Chimera for an overall fill behind the camera position…
Here’s the subject’s-eye view…
…and you can see we added a fourth light…that head to the right of the camera with a 7″ reflector and a 10 degree grid…it threw a bit more light onto the subjects face, ‘cuz that beauty dish aimed from the ground-up was just a wee bit too monster-lighty. Here are the first tests…
With our basic lighting nailed down and our mockup cover taped to the tripod…
…we were ready for the parade of people that would show up the next morning. Well…as ready as you can possibly be when you have to keep four separate shots in your head where you have to composite ten people into believable groups for the final image! In that two hour shoot window! Anyway…it all came together rather nicely…..
…I’m not kidding…Oscar’s watch is worth $1 million bucks!
Making sure to cover all manner of goofy expressions ‘cuz You never know what you’re gonna hafta do when putting the group shots together…
And in no time…we were done! Now came the assembly. This was the first simple comp I did with people added around our Global Table…
After moving a few people around and swapping in a different pose for Archie MacAllaster on the far left, I erased the plywood posing tables from under their hands and this was the result…
Next came a bit of color and contrast retouching, some tweeking of the levels and curves and dodging the highlights on everyones shoulders so they separated from the background a bit better…
And finally, we added a field of stars…..
…and here is the final cover, complete with the moon that replaced the usual ‘O’ in Barron’s (I can’t remember if that was Adrian’s idea or mine, but it was a nice touch)…..
Next up in Part Two…I’ll break down the assembly and retouching of the Behind-The-Scenes two-page opener for the Roundtable story, including how I managed to convince Adrian that this was a perfect situation to pull out my Artificial Portrait technique, as well and two additional shots we put together for the subsequent two editions of Barron’s.
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I’ve photographed Marty Whitman…the Founder, Co-Chief Investment Officer, and Portfolio Manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund…twice before, so when Adrian called me a couple of weeks ago to go back to the well for the third time I knew I wanted to do something completely different from what I had already done. Marty is a very cool guy…he always did whatever I came up with, whether it was to play tennis in the halls of his office, or pose under a fish that he caught on a company retreat…but this time I really just wanted to focus on Marty and do a study of just him without all the props and surroundings…..
While I was looking around the office for a place to shoot, I noticed kind of a quirky scene where they had pushed a bunch of chairs in front of some file cabinets so they could install a ping pong table in their cafeteria…
It made for another cool shot that bears a striking resemblance to a photo I did a few months ago of Neil Barofsky, the head of the TARP Fund. Maybe my next long-term photo project should be file cabinets across America……?!!
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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…..
VINCE GUARALDI & THE CHARLIE BROWN CHORUS
Christmas Time Is Here
DOWNLOAD: Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal)
DOWNLOAD: Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental)
My friend Adrian confessed to me this week that whenever he hears anything from the Charlie Brown Christmas album he turns into a pile of mush, so, because I’m the kinda guy who likes to make his friends get all mushy around the Holidays, here are a couple of versions of that old Christmas classic, Christmas Time Is Here. Happy Holidays!
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A few weeks ago, Adrian Delucca and Pamela Budz from Barron’s came to me with a cover project…..would I be interested in re-working a shot I had done for them last year that didn’t run into a slightly more stylized version for Penta, a new insert Dow Jones is including with the magazine. This was the original photograph I did of financial analyst Stephanie Pomboy…..
First, we had to come up with the same piece of furniture that Stephanie had in her apartment…thank God for The Conran Shop! The only tiny wrinkle was that it was in bright orange and we kinda had our hearts set on green…..
…but I knew that Photoshop was gonna let me pick and choose whatever final colors we needed! Next, I had to stuff the drawers with a few hundred thousand dollars of prop money…..
…and finally, after Kelly worked a bit of her magic on Jackie Mumm, our model……
…we ended up with this…..
…and our final cover image…..
Pretty much all that was left for us to do was to horse around on the set!!! Adrian got to trash the money…..
…and my stylist, Naila, wanted to burn the place down!!!
(Don’t ya just love what happens when you spin those Photoshop dials?!!)
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Normally with my environmental portraits, I don’t hafta mess with the ‘environment’ too much, but on occasion the ability to move pixels around in Photoshop can come in handy. Today’s post is brought to by Adobe®…..
A while back, Barron’s Photo Editor Adrian Delucca asked me to shoot Fund Manager Jim Melcher of Balestra Capital for the magazine’s Hedge Fund Report section. Now, I’ve shot businessmen in business situations for a couple of decades, so I’m used to heading into yet another office and making ‘art’ where no art can be found, but the offices at Balestra were especially challenging…yes, they were extremely small and of course they were hardly pretty…some might say they were utilitarian at best…but even worse, the company was packing up to move into fancier digs so there was really nothing there that would lend itself to photography, let alone ‘ART’…
The only possible option was to use the small conference room (that doubled as their lunch room) which had a frosted-glass window dividing it from another office. I dunno, maybe the reflection on the glass table would spice up the shot….the room was barely 8 feet wide with a heavy glass table taking up every square inch of space, but it was better than slapping him up against a beige wall and whacking him with the ringlight! So we lit the High-Holy-Hell outta the place and walked away with a nice portrait. I sent my selects (including this one) off to Adrian…..
…and he sent back this…..
…and asked if I had any horizontals…or…could we make a horizontal as he had done. Normally I’m pretty good about covering all the angles…horizontal & vertical are kinda standard…but in this case, because the shot seemed so obviously vertical, I didn’t do a single horizontal option. But Adrian was right. Looking at his mocked-up version, I could see it was much more powerful without the busy reflection in the table. So I told him, “Sure! I can do anything…”, and he chose another frame as his select…
…and I went to work! Besides getting rid of the lights in the right side of the frame, I added a lotta window panes as well as extend the table and wall at the bottom/right. Because of the heavy split-lighting on his upper body, I also had to clean up the shadows on his neck because it sort of looked like a tree trunk in a horror movie. And finally I cleaned up his reflection in the glass table and desaturated the whole shot…the blue was a bit much, even for me. My final cloned & retouched image looked like this…..
…and here it is, in today’s copy of Barron’s…..
Damn Ugly Photography 
