I’ve been shooting a lot lately for Eric Godwin at Bloomberg Markets, and a month ago he had us make a couple of trips down to D.C. to shoot Mary Schapiro, the head of the Securities & Exchange Commission, and her Chief Enforcement investigator, Robert Khuzami. Between the time they spend testifying in front of congress and chasing down the bankers who caused the current financial crisis, these two are so busy that I was warned I was going to be getting very little time to shoot. For Mary, I had to come away with at least two situations, one of them a cover try. After scouring a building filled with official looking seals and crests on the walls, we settled on the SEC hearing room for the cover….
Kaz and Ben knock off a few test frames…
Kaz and the MacBeth chart…
Try to look like you mean business…!!!
…and the final result…..
With the first shot in the bag (taking all of about 5 minutes!) we raced over to the slightly bizarre press conference area that was in the hallway outside. It had a wonderfully blank look about it, so we lit it with a very direct, blank light…
Lighting was just an open-faced Octalight for an overall fill and a bare head to throw a direct, hard shadow…
Total time with Mary…maybe 15 minutes…and then it was back to New York……but the very next day Eric called and said we had to go back! He just found out that they needed Robert Khuzami shot as well. OK…pack up the van and off we go again…..
Now I actually knew quite a bit about Khuzami before we got back down to D.C. He is probably best-known as the Federal Prosecutor in the trial of the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdel-Rahman, and he’s equally respected for the convictions he’s gotten in numerous insider trading, fraud and organized crime cases. But I was immediately struck by was a nice, normal guy he was…and he had his kids art up on his office wall right next to his law enforcement mementoes and courtroom drawings of him in action. So that’s where we shot him, using the same kind of lighting we used on the second shot of Mary…
To pass the time this morning whilst the rain & snow once again descends on Manhattan, I put on an old Luka Bloom album and let the mournful wailings of a homesick Irishman wash over me, when outta nowhere I get an email from Francesco Ferorelli. He’s played drums for a bunch of punk and metal bands over the past decade and regularly sends me what he’s doing…most of it totally unsuitable for human consumption, or at least the delicate flowers that frequent The List…but now he tells me that during his head-bangin’ period he was actually a closet Kris Kristofferson fan and was writing his own songs…FOLK SONGS…and recorded them on an LP under the name The Heaven’s Jail Band. Making up the band are Ethan Schmid (Glory Girls) on drums, James Preston (The Americans, Alana Amrama and the Rough Gems) on Bass, John Hunter (Lower Dens, Glory Girls) on lead guitar, and guest Scott Stapleton (Phosphorescent, Virgin Forest) on keys. Now maybe it’s simply because I still had residual Luka swirling around in my earholes, but listen to ‘Mary Watches Everything’ off of 1992’s ‘The Acoustic Motorbike’ and then tell me if there isn’t an eerie similarity.
I had every intention of kicking out something rocky and dark and loud today, but I’ve had a headache since breakfast, so I’ve been quietly humming along all morning to this dream-poppy number from Brooklyn-based Aussies, Sherlocks Daughter. I first discovered these guys last month when I saw bandmembers Tim Maybury and Tanya Horo on the cover of the Village Voice in a real estate feature. Based on that bit of notoriety, I don’t know what convinced me to check them out, but I’m glad I did ‘cuz I love this kinda stuff. I find it very relaxing to be enveloped by waves of feedback-drenched shoegazey guitars, moderately self-important electronica and a softly swirling nondescript female vocal. They’ve caught the ears of the downtown music intelligentsia since even Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is a fan…which, now that I think of it, sorta makes sense since Tanya’s voice is a lot like a softer version of Kim Gordon’s. Sonic Youth producer John Agnello is apparently twiddling the knobs on their debut album, due out later this Spring. In the meantime, head over to their MySpace Page to hear a few more tracks.
I’ve been so busy with real work that I kinda ignored everything that went on at SXSW this year, but I’ve just done a bit of searching around what caught people’s attention this week in Austin, and found a few gems that stood out from the rest, including a beauty from Lex Land. I haven’t heard much from her since she snagged the top spot on my Songs of the Year back in 2008 with the opium-laced crier, ‘As Much As You Lead’ from her debut album, Orange Days On Lemon Street, but on the quirky and jazzed-up ‘Havana’, from the upcoming album Were My Sweetheart To Go, she’s certainly pumped up the energy on this fun little hip-shaker. No release date yet for the new record, but you should check out her website for more news.
There are songs that can draw me in simply because of a visceral mood they create…songs where the lyrics and music blend so perfectly that reality gets momentarily turned off and I’m suddenly carried away by an aural wave of emotion…songs like this. I first heard ‘Polarise’ on Alt Nation and was immediately transported into a Cocteau Twins/Slowdive/Lush/My Bloody Valentine/Jesus & Mary Chain universe of dark, melancholy keyboard melodies, swirling atmospheric guitar runs, and an almost cinematic sense of dire importance. At the 40 second mark when that tinkling guitar sneaks up on Eleanor Dunlop’s hypnotic vocal, it actually raised the hairs on my neck.
Cameras are from Sydney, Australia and besides singing, Dunlop also handles the keyboards, while Fraser Harvey plays guitar & bass and Ben Mason is on drums. You really gotta check these guys out on MySpace or on their Facebook Page and you can get the Cameras EP on iTunes
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!
Click for Full-Size
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!
Damn Ugly Photography has been around for just over two years now, but the main reason it exists at all…the Song of the Day List…started way back in 2004 as a way for me to waste some time by emailing out whatever new music I happened to find to a small list of my friends. That small list grew over time until I hit over 1,000 people and my ISP’s spam filter kicked in, making it no longer possible for me to send the mass email out to the blind list. So in February of 2009 I got this place going and decided to include more and more photo-related posts. I mean, I did call it Damn Ugly Photography, right?!!
Anyway…I was reminded of the early days of The List when I drove into the city yesterday while listening to a playlist of some of my favorite pre-blog stuff from obscure Indie bands that I was typically hearing for the first time. These are songs that I still count among the favorite music I have sitting in my iTunes folder. And as some of you probably know, over the years I’ve actually gotten pretty close with a number of the artists and record labels and we’re lucky enough to have new music fall off the back of the truck well in advance of the actual release dates. Jets Overhead, Say Hi, Kate Tucker, Audrye Sessions, Johanna & the Dusty Floor, School of Seven Bells, Nadia Ackerman and many, many more have all sent leaks from the studio for us to enjoy, and just today, Ryan Karazija sent me some new cuts from his latest project, Tabula Rasa, that I’ll be getting some of it up very soon.
So today I’m gonna give y’all a nostalgic look back of some of that music…without my usual flowery comments…as a little history lesson on how far The List has come. Trust me, this will make one Hell of a great Indie playlist!
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.
As I said in the SOTD below, it was a busy month for Damn Ugly. We’ve been getting a lotta notices all over the interwebs, so I thought I would share some of those mentions with the rest of you…
Profoto saw that PopPhoto piece on me and finally realized that since 98% of my Artificial Portraits feature one or more of their products, that just maybe they should jump on the bandwagon…..
Nothing To Nobody, the Australian online digital magazine for people with style, taste and intelligence, did an interview with me for their latest issue. I wish I could show you how groovy it is, but unlike most of the internet, they want you to pay to play…but don’t be a cheap bastard……it’s only 2 bucks!!!
Photography consultant, writer, event producer and educator Louisa Curtis featured me on her monthly Chatterblog, a roundup of cool photo-related stuff she stumbled upon…..
The Curious Brain is a mashup of design curiosities, photography, illustration, social media, advertising, video, animation and found images that included some of my portraits…..
And finally, Finnish photographer Klaus Elfving got so inspired after reading a little off-the-cuff tutorial I did on the Strobist Group on Flickr that he decided to mimic the lighting himself…..
Yeah, yeah…like I need you guys telling me I basically blew off February by hardly posting anything, but hey…on occasion I gotta work and Damn Ugly don’t exactly pay the bills! Alright…I’m gonna get back at it with a wonderful undiscovered song from late-’60s by The Rolling Stones!!! Of course, I’m just pullin’ your leg, ‘cuz The Booze are actually five kids from Atlanta, but come on…if lead singer Chaz Tolliver wasn’t hit with a Mick Jagger stick, I’ll eat a bug! And when you blend in the stripped-down, retro production on ‘Hit Me Where It Hurts’, you’ve got a song that feels like it was delivered in the Time Machine from the Summer of Love! You just gotta head over to their website or make friends on MySpace and follow these guys!
I was recently interviewed by Popular Photography contributor Laurence Chen for the February issue’s ‘HOW * Creative Thinking’ section. The article featured a little behind-the-scenes look at my portrait of Howard Sontag. Big thanks Laurence and PopPhoto, and you can check out the article HERE
There a was a period a couple of years back where it seemed like everything I was listening to was from obscure Swedish shoegaze/dreampop bands…but I simply upped my dose of Lexapro and moved on to more happy tunes that didn’t make me wanna jump of the nearest tall building. Then just this morning I stumbled over ‘Waifs & Strays’, off of Silesia, the new album from the Swedish quartet Jeniferever, and all those dark thoughts are coming back to me. The deeply layered sound, with it’s orchestral richness and syncopated percussive flourishes, lifts singer Kristofer Jönson’s slacker vocal and achieves a beautifully overwrought grandiosity…all in about five minutes. And it’s got me thinking I might hafta spend more time back on the Swedish music blogs…
For those of you who like to get an early jump on the news, here’s a portrait I did of Abby Joseph Cohen…the Senior U.S. investment strategist at Goldman Sachs…that’s running in this weekends NYTimes Sunday Magazine. And no, I’m not jumping the gun even though it’s only Friday, since they’ve already got the story up on their website!
Just checked the mail…a big, fat envelope filled with copies of this month’s Resource Magazine took up the entire mailbox and yours truly and my Number One Son, Kaz Sakuma, are featured prominently in a photo essay on photographers and their assistants!
Thanks to Alex & Aurelie at Resource…but I dunno if my ego can stand it!!!
I kinda started loving this song as soon as the opening watery, retro lead guitar fuzzed it’s way into my heart, and then Cullen Omori’s psychedelic Emo vocal slipped into my ears and visions of Gary Glitter, Marc Bolan and T. Rex, 70’s glam, velour bell-bottoms and tie-dye washed over me and all that was missing was a bong and a black light! Smith Westerns are from Chicago and all of the members in the band (Cullen’s brother Cameron on bass, Max Kakacek on that groovy lead guitar and Colby Hewitt on drums) are between the ages of 18-20…so I guess the whole 70’s-Retro thing is all new to them, right?!! No matter…every generation needs a bit of Glam Rock for fun and these guys seem to have it down. ‘Weekend’ is from Dye It Blonde, which dropped last week, and you can head over to MySpace for more news about the band.
Yes…I know…we’re 21 days into the new year and this is the first newSOTD I’ve dropped on The List. It’s been so long I’m actually forgetting HTML codes! Sucks for you guys, but work has kinda gotten in the way of me pumpin’ out new tunes for your iPods! But never fear…I’ma gonna try to get back on the horse on a more regular basis, starting today…
Say Hi…Eric Elbogen to his friends…is dropping a new album, Um, Uh-Oh, on January 25th and you just know I’ll be first in line for a copy. Say Hi is right up at the top of my list of bands nobody has ever heard of, but I’ve been doing my best to change that. I’ve featured him on The List twice before (HERE and HERE), ‘November Was White, December Was Grey’ made it on the 2009 Songs of the Year and know that a number of your have shown the love and picked up some of his dark and spooky one-man-band recordings. And he’s even gotten a bit of mainstream play when Cadillac, of all things, used his song, “One, Two…One” in a CTS commercial a few months back! So let’s not let him down…head on over to The Official Say Hi Website and ‘Say Hi’…and make sure to check out the FAQ Section
And for you car geeks, here’s the short version of that Cadillac ad…
Damn Ugly was featured this week on both culturedrop.com and sneezr.ca and I must say, while I’m extremely flattered by the opinions others have of me, all of this attention is gonna force me to get up off the couch and do something to prove them right!
Jenan Mujkic runs Sneezr.ca and he stumbled across my work late last year. One of the things he does is an ‘interview-via-email’ that usually asks a single, open-ended question. For me, he actually had two questions and you can read the interview here:
We humans just love lists! Even the least-OCD person you know secretly appreciates the order and clarity of nice, neat End-of-the-Year Top-Ten List. Lists make it easier for our little human brains to organize all the garbage that gets thrown at us every day. Unfortunately, a lot of the lists that you’ve seen in the past few weeks in newspapers, magazines, on TV and online are mostly full of shit! We live in a World where Cee Lo Green singing, ‘Fuck You!” (New York Times ‘Best Song’ of the Year) and an even more self-indulgent-than-normal Kanye West hollering, “Let’s have a toast for the Douchebags” (“Runaway” – New York Post ‘Top Song of 2010’), is lauded as High Art. Call me an old fart if you want, but I hear this stuff and can’t help but think that even some of the worst songs I’ve put on The List in the past year are better written and performed!
With that little rant outta the way, I’ve culled through everything I tossed out over the past 12 months, tried to keep it real by touchin’ on all the food groups, and finally come up with a pretty good mix of indie, guitar-strummin’, singer/songwriter, power-poppy, electronica and alt-rock goodness. And I gotta say, it was bloody hard this year to keep it to only ten choices! Each year, it always amazes me at the sheer quality of the music I stumble upon that quite frankly, most people will never even hear! Cee Lo may get 50 million YouTube views and Kanye is washing the road grime off of his Lamborghini with Cristal, but I’m still gonna champion these performers because they’re turning out music I can actually listen to!
So even though this will undoubtedly be looked upon by some as yet another full-of-shit Top Ten list…I give you…..
The Damn Ugly Photography Top Ten Songs From 2010!!!
10. JOHANNA AND THE DUSTY FLOOR
Love Is A Breakable Thing
Very good friends of The List, Johanna & the Dusty Floor, dropped The Forest EP back in November and it only makes me want to hear her new album even more. Keep your eyes on her MySpace and Facebook pages for the release date!
The theatrical, Joy Division-like fuzzy vibe these guys have working must have been catchy, ‘cuz a lotta you wrote thankful notes to me back in February and said you coughed up a few bucks to buy the EP. You can follow INU over at Inu Music.
It was indeed a very bad day when Audrye Sessions announced a few months back that they were packing it in…we were crying like babies here at The List…but back in May when Ryan sent me this song we were amped by the frenzy of fun ‘Bad Day’ laid down and so looking forward to more from would end up being the final ‘sessions’. But Ryan assures me his new EP will be out this month and you all know I’ll have a taste when it becomes available!
I loved Portishead, so it was natural I was gonna love Phantogram. The sad, drowsy guitars, the scratchy backtrack and even Sarah Barthel’s voice that’s a dead ringer for Beth Gibbons…’When I’m Small’ had me swaying side-to-side back in January. Check out Phantogram over on MySpace
6. ANDREW BELLE (featuring KATIE HERZIG)
Static Waves
I first found out about Andrew Belle after seeing Katie Herzig (#3 on the list this year) in concert and ‘Static Waves’, the duo they did together, showed up on The List in October. You can follow Andrew Belle on his MySpace Page or over on his website
It’s sad, it’s sexy and it’s simply beautiful. I can’t say it any better than I did when I originally posted it back in June, but do yourself a favor and check out Sarah on her MySpace Page
The first time I heard ‘Changing Your Mind’, it gave me an ache in the back of my throat…the kind of heartfelt ache that convinced me even back then that it was bound for the end of the year list. You can’t fake this kind of soulful singing. Check out Bob Schneider on his MySpace page.
I never knew when I went to see Brandi Carlile I’d come away with a bunch of CD’s from Katie Herzig, but that’s why we go to see live music, right? You never know who’s gonna pop up and grab you! Katie is a special talent and you can follow her on her website or over on MySpace
There was far less electronica on The List this year, but my love of dream-pop and the fact that this song stayed at the very top of my iTunes folder all year ensured it a spot near the top of this years list. And I could listen to Alejandra and Claudia Deheza trade off harmonies all day and night! Get more SVIIB on MySpace or on their Website
Over the past few months, Nadia has become BFF’s with The List…we even shot her new album cover package…so ya can’t be too surprised to find her sitting on top of this years heap, and nobody deserves it more! She’s such an amazingly gifted songwriter and that strong, expressive voice can melt even the hardest heart. Her second album, The Ocean Master, is due to be released this Spring…in fact, she and Harvey are in Wales mixing the record it as I type this…so please, head on over to her facebook page for more information.
Damn Ugly Photography 