Kaz Sakuma

Do You Have Any Stronger Sawhorses For The Chairman?!!

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A few weeks ago, Mr. DeLucca asked if I would like to take a trip up to Herald Square to shoot Terry Lundgren, the President, Chairman of the Board, Director and CEO of Macy’s. “Yeah”, I said, “but only if I don’t hafta do some lame picture of him on the retail floor!”. Thus began our journey…

I went up to Macy’s for a quick location scout and was of course shown every square inch of the million square feet of retail space in the World’s Largest Department Store…none of which really interested me. What I really wanted to see was their display department…I had a kind of cool idea that required mannequins and such, but I got shot down on that one. I was then offered a look around their ‘Executive Offices’, which is normally the kiss of death, but in this case it proved damned inspiring. The floor dates back to the 1902 origin of the building and was stunning, but what really got me going was the Executive Dining Room. The walls were covered in frescos painted in the 1940’s that show views of the building as it looked back then…

But using the P/R guy as a stand in, I saw immediately that just dropping him in front of the wall was gonna be flat-footed and boring…..

I needed to raise him up and get him into the scene, and that was gonna take a lot of gear! (And since this was a Barron’s gig, I only had one assistant) So Kaz and I showed up early…we got to Macy’s three hours before the shoot…and proceeded to turn the dining room into a photo studio for real. Besides my usual two tons of lighting gear, we hauled in apple boxes, saw horses, a sheet of plywood and a 4 x 8 piece of white plexiglass and went about rigging a platform that would raise him up to the right height…

But we still had one final hurdle to get over…the P/R guy walked in while we were setting up and had concerns about our plastic saw horses….”Do you have any stronger sawhorses for the Chairman?!!”. I had to get up on the platform and dance a jig to convince him we were safe. And it was worth it…here’s the resulting page in Barron’s…

But I wasn’t done. My favorite image was actually like that set-up shot I sat in for. The much more dramatic, pulled-back view of Lundgren is now sitting at the front of my portfolio…

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

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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…….

Behind The Scenes At The 2011 Barron’s Roundtable PART ONE

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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.

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…..

Palm Beach + July = Very, Very Hot !!!

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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…..

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!

AOL Shoot for The Hollywood Reporter

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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…..

The Barron’s Roundtable – 2010 Edition

I’ve kinda been neglecting to include any actual photo-related posts lately, but a lot of what I’ve been shooting hasn’t run yet and until it does, it’s gotta stay under wraps, but here is a recent job I did for Barron’s…..

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I’ve been shooting the Barron’s Roundtable cover for a lotta years now, and every year the challenge is to reinvent how to photograph these ten fund managers in new & compelling compositions that will work for the cover, an inside spread, a couple of weeks worth of feature portraits and if that’s not enough, another cover that runs mid-year…all in a little over an hour! The entire production takes a boatload of planning before we even show up at the location…this year’s meeting was at The Harvard Club…but the main trick is keeping to a schedule that will allow us to get all that work done with only seven or eight minutes per person. It’s one thing to make an interesting portrait of a person given those time constraints, but add in all of the different final uses, the fact that most of the images will have to be assembled into group shots in Photoshop and the meeting room we were using as our ‘studio’ was so old that there was only one fifteen-amp electrical circuit for the whole room which meant we had to rent just about every battery-powered strobe in Manhattan to light the two sets, when we’re done it felt like we had gone to war!

Since we always do the actual shoot very early in the morning, before the meeting starts, we always give ourselves a pre-light day, and this was what we came up with for our cover test…..

…then, on a second set, we put this together…

The ‘fun’ part on a shoot like this is always convincing these very buttoned-down investment executives to trust me when I ask them to do whatever it is we’ve cooked up for the cover. This year, the little metaphor we were trying to hammer home was ‘looking around the corner’, so we rigged a few foamcore panels and had each person playing with that idea…..


…Dr. Marc Faber


…Mario Gabelli


…Bill Gross


…and Kelly, touching up Oscar Schafer!

All of which came together inside as this Photoshop-realized group shot…..

With that part done, we quickly moved to the second set for a few tighter portraits which would result in these images that ran in the following weeks……

Bring In The Clouds!

I have always said “Life is good if you love what you do…” and even after all these years (and the occasional bitching and moaning I have been known to do every once and while when things don’t go exactly the way I want) I can still say that I do love what I do. I recently shot a job that could have turned out a lot different if I had simply stuck with the cards that were dealt to me, but instead I pushed a bit and turned a crappy situation into a pretty cool shot.

BusinessWeek SmallBiz hired me to shoot the founders of First Global Shipping…a kind of international messenger service that operates like FedEx, but uses commercial airlines to move their packages. FGX lives up to what SmallBiz is all about…it’s a very small business! When I checked the place out on a scout, I found that they operate their entire operation out of a small, unadorned loft in Chelsea. Nothing glitzy, fancy or even remotely interesting in terms of a photographic setting…so I had to come up with something a bit more showy. I convinced Kathy Moore, my photo editor, that I could pull off a bit of fun, but she would hafta open up the purse…I needed a backdrop and a bunch of airplanes!

When we returned, the only space big enough for our purposes was their ‘light-ops’ area…this is where they log in shipments before they get sent to the local airports for transport. This more or less meant we would be shutting them down for as long as we were setting up and shooting. And of top of everything else, we basically had to push everything in the entire area out of the way and up against the walls in order to make the space usable.

With the background in place, we then had to suspend the toy airplanes…..I hafta admit…this part of the exercise was not thought out as well as it could have been, but I always carry way more stuff than I need and we managed to rig everything…eventually!

Bo & Kaz as stand-ins….notice how Bo never looks at the lens when I fire up the ring light!

The two founders of FGX, James Dowd and Justin Brown, were really into the whole idea…..small business guys are like that…they don’t have a team of p/r guys overthinking every little thing that may or may not happen based on what they do in the public eye. I can guarantee the Chairman of FedEx wouldn’t pose with toy airplanes! But FGX ain’t that kinda company yet. In fact, their communication manager, Chevon Drew, was Twittering the entire time we were shooting and later put the whole thing up on the FGX Blog!

James & Justin lovin’ the business!

The story came out this month in SmallBiz…..you can check it out…HERE!

And this is how it all came together in the end…..

To see the BIG version of the final image, click HERE!

Long day…fun shoot…and I still get off on how I make a buck!