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!
Damn Ugly Photography
Where’s Waldo?!!
As of this week, the Northern Command Outpost of Damn Ugly Photography has a couple of new tenants…two new bear cubs…..
Click on image to see the little bears Full-Size!
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
Click on any image for Full-Size
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
Do You Have Any Stronger Sawhorses For The Chairman?!!
Click on Any Image for Full-Size
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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…
So Mikhail Baryshnikov Says To Me…
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That’s right…Baryshinkov! I can’t help but love my job, but when I get to meet some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with, even I hafta to step back from time to time and ask myself…really?!!
I’ve done a few gigs lately for the London Sunday Times, so when photo editor Sean McKillop called and asked if I wanted to shoot Mikhail Baryshnikov and his wife Lisa Rinehart up at their country house for the weekend ‘Home’ magazine, I didn’t skip a beat before saying yes. The couple was selling the centuries-old converted barn they’ve lived in since 1981 and I was there to not only get a few portraits of them, but also as many views of the house as possible. The only problem…Misha’s schedule was extremely limited and I would have no more than half an hour with the two of them. Of course, the Times wanted ‘four or five’ portrait situations, never mind that on the day we were to shoot it was about 38 degrees and pouring rain!
After a whirlwind tour of the house, we started by lighting what would be the cover image of the two of them at the front door to the house…
…..then very quickly set up two additional portraits in the sunroom (bathed in clouds)…
…and in front of a fireplace in the original part of the house…
With his part of the performance over, Misha bid us good day and I then got off a photo of Lisa relaxing with one of the many cats that share the house with them…
With the portraits out of the way, we then went about shooting as many detail shots as possible…
Thanks to Sean for the gig and thank you Misha & Lisa for allowing me the opportunity to spend a bit of time with you…
Azim Premji in the Time 100
My portrait of Azim Premji…the Bangalore-based gazzilionaire who owns Wipro, the third-largest Indian IT company…was featured this week in ‘The Time 100’, the magazine’s annual list of the most influential people in the world. And if that wasn’t cool enough, the story was written by none other than Bill Gates.
I’m havin’ kind of a good week!
SEC Commissioner Mary Schapiro for Bloomberg Markets
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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…
One final shot of me with the Commissioner…
Behind The Scenes At The 2011 Barron’s Roundtable PART TWO
Click on any image for Full-Size
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!
OK…OK…there is this…….
Behind The Scenes At The 2011 Barron’s Roundtable PART ONE
Click on any image for Full-Size
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.
Damn Ugly Around The Blogoshere…
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…..
ProFoto Blog: Brad Trent’s Unconventional Executive Portraits
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!!!
Nothing to Nobody – Issue Three
Alan Dunlop, a photographer in Glasgow, put Damn Ugly in his list of the top five photo blog recommendations for January…..
Alan’s Diary – Top Five Photo Blog Recommendations For January 2011
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…..
Louisa Curtis – February ChatterBulletin
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…..
The Curious Brain – Brad Trent
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…..
PopPhoto Gets Damn Ugly
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
How Much Does Snow Weigh?!!
I don’t know how you spent your Saturday, but this was my day.
The Northern Command Headquarters of Damn Ugly Photography has gotten somewhere North of 80 inches of snow in the past month, so I figured it was time to get some of that heavy stuff off of the roof.
As to my question…how much does snow weigh?
A lot !!!
Abby Joseph Cohen for The Sunday Times Magazine
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!
Have a great weekend!
Me & Kaz Are BFD’s…!!!
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!!!
Camille approves…..
Inspiring & Undeniably Good…
…Well, thank you very much!!!
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:
How to be undeniably good. How to be like Brad.
CultureDrop is a online magazine documenting the latest in culture, technology design and fashion, and their feature on me is here:
Damn Ugly Photography 