photography

Making a DigitalMan

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Sure…with a little Photoshop and a lotta time you could probably manufacture an image like the one above, but wouldn’t it a lot more fun to pull out a $10,000 lighting gizmo and do it all in-camera?!! That’s just what we did to illustrate the idea of the flow of a digital data stream. The hyper-priced toy was the Profoto ZoomSpot…

…the type of follow spot used to create stage lighting effects, but in this case it’s fitted with a 4800 w/s flash tube. All I had to do was make up a few transparencies of ‘zeroes’ and ‘ones’ to drop into the projector and then we could play around with color combinations and lighting ratios until I got the kind of dramatic image I had floating around in my head. The lighting diagram shows the setup wasn’t that complicated…

A large Chimera Super Pro and both skim lights were covered by two Full CTB gels to bathe the entire set in blue light. The background light…with a half-blue and a magenta gel…was aimed through a wooden Matthews cucoloris that created the shadows on the seamless. All that remained was to get the color and lighting ratio of the ZoomSpot just right so that the projected image popped at just the right intensity. Two full CTO gels and setting the spot about one stop brighter than all those blue lights was what we ended up with.

A Tiny Sofa and a Big Table for Barron’s…

My eclectic tour of the Nation’s boardrooms recently took me to the offices of Riverpark Capital, where I was to photograph Morty Schaja, Mitch Rubin and Conrad van Tienhoven for a Barron’s profile. Lest any of you think that the life of a photographer is all Supermodels and hangin’ with Diddy, I beg you to read on…

Riverpark’s midtown office would never be described using words such as ‘opulent’, ‘palatial’ or ‘ostentatious’. But they are hardly alone in this…most places I find myself having to shoot in are equally utilitarian…but it can rattle my bones when I keep seeing the same furniture, cubicles, lighting and paint used again and again and again. Still, after a quick tour of the space, I decided to begin in the reception area…

…sort of a mini-history of the financial markets as seen through the eyes of Time Magazine. I kinda thought it would be a good place to start, so we dropped Mitch and Morty onto the little couch and went to work…

But we also had to photograph a situation with Conrad, the third partner in the firm, and there was zero chance of him fitting on that couch. That part of the story brings us to this conference room…

The first thing you gotta do when faced with the dreaded White Board/Conference Table scenario is ignore how frightfully normal the situation is and try to envision it instead as a set piece that will only work because of the personality you can bring to it. That first means usually cleaning it up and add some tasty lighting…

Next, stir in the talent…

…but the whole serious/symmetrical thing wasn’t doin’ it for me, so I told the guys to just go about doing what they normally do…let loose and ignore me…and they did…

…and that kind of unguarded moment was exactly what Adrian wanted for the story…

Keeping It Simple With Gabrielle Aimée

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When my friend Gabrielle Aimée asked me to shoot her new CD cover, she was very specific. She wanted to keep it very simple, but very direct. She wanted an intimate connection with the viewer, with minimal styling…maybe just a white t-shirt. Oh yeah…and we had to keep it dirt cheap, ‘cuz in case you forgot, my indie friends aren’t exactly rolling in GaGa Money to throw at their self promotion!

Now one of the things that always impresses people when they first arrive at Damn Ugly Photography is the giant 17 foot by 9 foot high South-facing window that greets them, and on the day Gibbles came up to my place to go over a few ideas, I had her stand up against the wall next to that window and popped off a few quick frames, just to see how she looked on camera with no styling and just a big wash of soft light…I was kinda blown away with the results…

So blown away, in fact, that I told her maybe we should just shoot here, and use the same big, soft lighting. I had an idea to include some rough hewn wood planks and maybe a painters canvas drop as backgrounds, but the real focus had to be her expressions. With that in mind, here’s a bit of what we did…

We started with a few seated poses on my new plank floor…

After a quick wardrobe change we did a few close-ups, but amped-up the window lighting to brighten things up a bit…

Then I turned our plank floor into a wall and we moved in this direction…

And even though we were diggin’ the window light, I figured I would fire up a couple of lights and do a few moodier variations…

And then, just when we thought we might be done, I messed her hair up, cranked up the ringlight, and things took on a totally different look…

Finally, Gibbles told me she wanted to do something fun for her boyfriend, Brendan Brown, the driving force behind the cult alt-rock group, Wheatus. That ‘something’ involved her brand new guitar…and not much else…

Gabrielle is set to release ‘I Know Better’…the first single off the album…and all you have to do is go to today’s Song of the Day to download it.

Up On The Roof, Playing Soccer With A Billionaire

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Normally when you get the call to shoot a Billionaire industrialist, you can pretty much bet you’re gonna have five minutes in a stark boardroom and there won’t be a whole lotta fun involved. This was exactly what Jeff Beasley…the Picture Editor at FourFourTwo magazine…hoped wouldn’t happen when he asked me to shoot Bob Rich, the Chairman of Rich Products Corporation, for a feature on unlikely soccer club owners. Rich had recently gotten involved with the Bedlington Terriers F.C.…a small football club playing in the Northern League based in Bedlington, England…after tracing his family tree back to the area and after his wife purchased the title of Lord Bedlington for him as a gift. Jeff wanted a portrait that would show Rich’s Big City American roots…something that might mimic a photograph I did of Howard Sontag high above Madison Avenue…while still tying in the Soccer aspect of the story. It turned out the Buffalo-based billionaire was going to be in New York City for a couple of days, but his schedule was extremely tight. We had a tiny window of opportunity to shoot him at his hotel…the Peninsula New York…but while extremely nice, was not exactly a soccer pitch in midtown. I called the hotel and their P/R person told me they that since it was Mr. Rich, they would gladly make the roof bar area available to us and that it has a “lovely view” of Central Park. Feeling buoyed by that news, I headed uptown (in the rain) to scout it out. This was the “lovely view” of the Park…

It wasn’t exactly the pastoral oasis amongst the concrete I had envisioned, but panning the roof I figured I could make something with what I had to work with…

The next morning the rain had stopped and Kaz and I arrived at the (extremely humid) crack of dawn and went about moving the 50 or so tables out of the way to turn the Salon de Ning Rooftop Lounge into our studio for the day…

With the sun out, lighting was super simple…all we needed was the Mola Setti on a boom and the backlighting did the rest…

We even broke out the tried & true ‘Ball Juggling’ routine…

Bob approves…

…and FourFourTwo liked it, too…

Optical Illusions & Ice Cream Cones

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For Part Two of my story featuring Anthony “Superman” Scaramucci, Bloomberg Markets magazine had me head back up to SkyBridge Capital to photograph Managing Partner Ray Nolte and Senior Portfolio Manager and Managing Director Troy Gayeski. Since I had already shot their boss shadow boxing in his office surrounded by cartoon characters, I kinda had to think of something equally offbeat for their portrait, but the rest of the SkyBridge office was decidedly not offbeat. It was, quite frankly…pretty utilitarian…office cubicles and a rather small trading area. But as Kaz and I were walking the halls we passed a tiny little kitchen area that caught my eye…

Now, I’ve been shooting guys in their offices my entire professional life, but this was the first box of ice cream cones I’ve ever come across. And even though the space was barely big enough to swing a cat, ice cream cones in a financial office had to be a sign to stop and take a photograph! So we did…

…and when Troy…who is actually at least an inch taller than Ray…jumped off the counter and stood next to him, we pulled off this almost Funhouse Mirror-style image…

Even though they were standing next to each other, the combination of the super wide-angle lens I was using and Troy leaning back slightly on the counter made him look freakishly small! But it certainly makes you stop and look.

Next, we decided to shoot them in the Sea of Cubicles that made up the trading area, but add a little bit of surreality by dropping a white seamless behind them…

…and the final image…

Anthony Scaramucci is Superman!!!

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Even with the highly charged, Occupy Wall Street attitude that is gripping the country, you hafta look at Anthony Scaramucci as a pretty interesting guy. Besides being the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, an asset management fund with about $8 billion in the bank, at 47 he’s already written his autobiography…‘Goodbye, Gordon Gekko: How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul’…had a cameo in Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps’, volunteers on the board of The Lymphoma Foundation and The Brain Tumor Foundation, is a rabid Mets fan who also hangs out with New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, got nicknamed “Gucci Scaramucci” by former President George W. Bush, and he has enough jam to draw investment superstars like Steven Cohen, Leon Cooperman and Kenneth Griffin and political heavies like Colin Powell and Gordon Brown, to the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, his annual symposium for hedge-fund managers and investors. But when I was sent to photograph him for Bloomberg Markets magazine, the one thing that jumped out at me was his unabashed love for all things Superman! Every wall and surface in his office has Superman memorabilia…posters, painting, games, sculptures…it was like I got sent to a 12 year-old kid’s room, and not the office of a Master of the Universe. But I quickly understood how this street-smart Harvard Law School graduate who wants “…to be the Peter Lynch of the hedge-fund industry!” held the Good vs. Evil metaphors that are at the center of every Superman cartoon close to heart, so we ran with it…

For once, Bo was the perfect height to act as a stand-in…

Our Barrel-Chested Financial Man of Steel…

…and the completed opening spread, with new creative director Siung Tjia’s Superman cape graphic that wraps the headline…

I Shot Mr. Post-It® Note For The London Sunday Times

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So I get a call from Andrew Mitchell, one of the photo editors at the London Sunday Times, and he needed me to hightail it to the Palace Hotel to shoot a feature on George Buckley, the Chairman & CEO of 3M. Now the Palace is a really nice hotel, but the idea of shooting a couple of portraits in his suite just kinda seemed flat, so after a bit of pleading with the hotel’s P/R people, they said if I was quick I could use the Gilt Bar as a studio. So Kaz and I packed up the van and made our way uptown, but not before making a stop at an Office Depot for some props. You see, 3M makes more than 55,000 products, including adhesives, abrasives, laminates, fire protection, dental products, electronic materials, medical products, polishes, waxes, car shampoo, car chassis rust protection, electronic circuits and optical films. But if you had to pick the one thing they make that everybody knows, it’s the Post-It® Note, and I bought almost every Post-It® Note on the shelf at that Office Depot! I had been to Gilt a few times and I had an idea to dress up the ultra-modern lounge area with a few (thousand) of the little paper stickies…

Kaz sits in for the first test…

…about half an hour later, after Post-It-ing the set…

…and the final image of George…

For a second photo, we turned 90 degrees to the left and set up a shot with George framed by a golden wall and warm lights…

The gold wall…

A nice start…

That was nice, George…but what do you say we try this…

Dont’cha just love it when the CEO of a HUGE multinational corporation has a sense of humor?!!

Your 5 Minutes with the CEO of Bayer begins…NOW!!!

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Here’s another from my ongoing series of CEO Spotlights from Barron’s…this time featuring Dr. Marijn Dekkers, the new CEO of Bayer AG. He was up at the Barron’s offices to be interviewed and I was told that because of his tight schedule, I would have precious little time with him for the portrait session. So we set up in the tiny video studio the magazine has tucked away down a back hallway and waited. Precisely on time, Dr. Dekkers and his publicist arrived and yes, they were already looking at their watches. Still, the five minutes was more than enough time to get off a couple of looks…without getting a headache!

Jim Grant For Barron’s

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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…

Driving Into NYC…

Stuck on the West Side Highway…whipped out my iPhone and fired up the very groovy Photosynth panorama app…..

Camille digs traffic! (Click on the image to make it get big!)

Up On The Roof…

Early morning, up on a roof in midtown Manhattan…with some soccer balls…..

Larry Fink for Barron’s

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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…

9/12

I dunno about the rest of you, but yesterday really kinda did me in. The non-stop media barrage of 9/11 remembrances and videos brought everything back in all too lurid detail. It drove me down into the basement and I emerged with a couple of photographs I took back in 1984…up on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I would much rather remember what it was like the day I took these shots…

Here Come Da Judge, Here Come Da Judge…

Until recently, William B. Chandler III was a Federal judge in Delaware, serving on the Delaware Court of Chancery with the title of Chancellor. But then he retired as Chancellor and became a managing partner of the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and I got a call from Larry Gendron…Art Director at The Deal…asking if I could do a feature shoot with The Judge. Now Larry and I hadn’t worked together in years…ever since he was at Financial World Magazine…so I really wanted to impress him with a good job, but the offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, while very functional, aren’t gonna be featured in the pages of ‘Dwell’ any time soon. We were faced with a lot of beige walls and small conference rooms…but Kaz and I still came away with three situations that Larry liked so much he put the story on the cover!

We started with a view down a hallway…

…then moved into the Board Room for the opener…

…and finally, we stuck him in a corner of the Law Library for what ended up being the cover shot…

Sometimes You Just Gotta Have Fun…

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Scott Milleisen is not only the head of the sports banking group at J.P. Morgan Chase, he’s also a Managing Director at the bank, so getting him to do anything outta his comfort zone for a photograph wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve done lately, especially with somebody from J.P. Morgan Corporate Communications over my shoulder the whole time. But even though were were led up to the top floor of the J.P. Morgan World Headquarters on Park Avenue…

…the floor with more modern art on it’s walls than you’ll find at MOMA, but not one that exactly screams ‘SPORTS’ at you…I still wanted to tie in the sports angle to his business. And given that he regularly puts together gazzilion dollar deals funding sports teams, the idea of shooting him in front of the twin Warhol Marilyns (Steve Cohen picked up one Marilyn from Larry Gagosian for $80 million a while back!) just seemed right. All that was left to do was hand him a baseball bat and get him to take a few cuts at the ball I hung from a boom stand.

Next we went around the corner and did a simpler shot of him hamming it up with a football against a brushed steel wall…

…and of course he had to strike the Heisman pose!

Photo Editor Sarah Morse sent me on this one for Institutional Investor and it’s on the stands now.

I Love Chicago…

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If you haven’t already guessed from my lack of posts recently, this month has been kinda busy here at Damn Ugly. Sorry ’bout that, but the necessity to work often gets in the way of me filling up the interweb with bloggy bits. So to get back in the saddle, I’m offering a little love letter to Chicago, where we found ourselves last week. I’ve been to Chicago a million times, but I was struck this trip by how much the city has changed…and I don’t just mean because of that gigantic Seward Johnson sculpture of Marilyn Monroe on Michigan Avenue. No, the city just feels more vibrant and polished. From the abundance of public spaces to the overwhelming amount of new buildings dotting the downtown area, everything just has a fresh energy about it. And on the one afternoon that wasn’t busy shooting I had a bit of time to take it all in. Between the iPhone Panorama’s, Hipstamatic shots and some stuff I did on the Canon, I built up a nice little portfolio of my walk around the Loop…..

Remember the Wilco album, ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’?!!

I love that cover…and those buildings…

While I was looking upwards, I became momentarily fixated on streetlamps…

And yes…I know it’s very blue!

What a way to make a living…

Next, I ended up in front of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ at Millennium Park…

…and it’s Circus Funhouse Mirror appeal…

Walking back to the hotel I knocked off another iPhone PhotoSynth panorama along Wacker Drive…

…and some Hipstamatic prints…

And one last shot of Marilyn with a guy really happy to be in Chicago…

…and finally…back to New York…

MTV’s Beauty Academy Gets Damn Ugly

When she’s not applying powder & lip gloss to my subjects, Kelly Stedman…my good friend and makeup artist of the past 15 years…has been producing reality shows, and for quite a while she’s been trying to include me in one of her little projects. I have always declined because I don’t really have a desire to get thrown into some televised ‘reality’ drama, but last month she asked if I could help her out on a new show she’s doing for MTV on a Beauty School in New Jersey and I finally caved in and agreed to give it a go. The show follows hair stylists Thomas McKiver and Oscar Bond and a group of students at The Bond Academy. Thomas and Oscar put the kids through the paces, and as incentives the top students get to assist them on photo shoots. That’s where I come in. For the first shoot, my crew and I trucked out to Bloomfield NJ on one of the hottest days of the year to set up a fantasy hair shoot in a third-floor walk-up, un-airconditioned Salsa Dance Studio. Here is some of the fun that ensued…..

My assistants Vivian Alban and Alex Minkin stand in for the models…

Kaz and I on set…

Hair stylist Thomas McKiver checks how things are looking…

The video and sound crew guys…

Don’t stare at the hair…don’t stare at the hair…..

Try not to mix up the model’s names…

Tall, skinny models on set, please…

Happy models…

…and happy students…

And here is some of how it all looked in the end…

Lauren B…

Roz…

Behold the Power of Blogging!!!

All you regular readers of Damn Ugly will certainly recall how just last week I called out Apple on the little Photoshop mistake they let pass on the Apple Store website……well…surprise, surprise…I’m sure that because of the millions of hits my little blog post generated on their site, they must have figured out that even in tiny thumbnail photo-illustrations, reflections matter and…..they fixed it!!!

Who sez ya can’t fight City Hall??? Maybe I should take up a sword and fight Bloomberg and those bloody bike lanes next?!!

Photoshop Fail of the Day

Checking my Twitter feed this morning, I see that the eagle-eyed folks over at Design Informer (@designinformer) have spotted a pretty good Photoshop fail on Apple’s website…..

Still not seeing it? OK…that big red arrow is pointing to the reflection which clearly shows ‘i5’ and not the ‘i7’ of the Intel chip….rookie mistake!

Mola Likes Damn Ugly…

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!