Profoto

Kurt Andersen For The Village Voice

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As the Village Voice ends it’s 62 year run as New York’s best alternative newspaper in a couple of weeks, I was given a last opportunity to contribute one more portrait session to the time capsule. Photo Editor Andrea Maurio asked me to meet author, editor, radio host and Bon Vivant Kurt Andersen in a park in Brooklyn…here’s how it went…

Setting up under the trees…

Kaz under ambient light, overcast…I sure hope that Sun pops out…

Add the 3′ Profoto RFI…

Insert subject, press the button…

Kurt was on a tight schedule, but for a quick second shot we just had to turn the camera 45 degrees South for this view under a row of trees…

Kale Friesen was also helping out that day…he got to be Macbeth Boy…

This was OK…

…but I told Kale to go grab one of the cafe chairs we saw on the other side of the park…

That did it.

Here’s how it looks in print…

And you can read the story online HERE

The Voice has two weeks to go in it’s print life. Go out and pick up a copy while you still can.

Silence = Death

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Last week, Andrea Maurio at the Village Voice asked me to photograph the five surviving members of the Silence = Death Collective for this years ‘Pride’ issue.

For the first time in years, the five guys who created a poster consisting of a pink triangle set against a black background with the words “Silence = Death” below it, would be together at the same time for a 30 year commemorative gathering at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Because of the event, we weren’t going to have a lot of time to shoot, but I still had to come away with a group shot and individual portraits of each guy. And because of all the people attending the event, shooting a group photo inside the gallery would be impossible. We decided to use the outside of the building…

The Silence = Death Collective: L-R, Avram Finkelstein, Charles Kreloff, Jorge Socarras, Brian Howard & Christopher Lione

After a very quick five minutes on the sidewalk, we moved back inside to a small office we commandeered as our portrait studio for the individual photos…

The Village Voice Pride Issue is out today and you can read the story How Six NYC Activists Changed History With “Silence = Death”

Special thanks to Avram, Charles, Jorge, Brian & Christopher for allowing me the opportunity to photograph them, and to Andrea Maurio and Ashley Smestad Velez for the great assignment.

Nick Murphy AKA Chet Faker

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I recently got to spend a day with Australian singer/songwriter Nick Murphy, better known by his stage name, Chet Faker. The Sydney Morning Herald was doing a cover story for their Sunday magazine that talked about his new album and how he was going to use his real name after five years as Faker. Tegan Sadlier, the photo editor at the Herald, and I tossed around a bunch of ideas before deciding on “Will The Real Nick Murphy Please Stand Up?” as our cover headline. More on that later, but here’s how the shoot went…

I have long had Ruby Bird Studios in Greenpoint on my radar, but haven’t had the right subject to take advantage of the wonderful grunge they have to offer…Nick was that subject! The old warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront was made for a day of rock star portraits…

While studio 520 can hardly be described as a daylight space, it does have a cool casement window…

…that with minimal lighting (one big umbrella directly over Nick’s head) made for a nice, moody start…

Just to the left of the window was a beat up old sliding metal door that I liked for some tight portraits…

To the right of the window was an even more interesting door, but this one was recessed in a brick wall that would make for a frame around Nick…

…and that furry green coat…perfect!!!

Finally, for our cover concept…I convinced Tegan I could do a multiple image photo of Nick in different positions, wearing different outfits, to illustrate the ‘Will The Real Nick Murphy Please Stand Up?’ idea…

This wall was our base…

Next, we had to place our ‘Nicks’ in different spots in the frame…

And when that was done, all that was left was for me to spend a day at the computer making a group shot…with the ‘real’ Nick standing up!

…and here’s our final cover…

Bo Dietl Wants Your Vote For Mayor Of New York City!!!

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Bo Dietl wants to be Mayor of New York City, and Ashley Smestad Vélez from the Village Voice sent me up to his office for a look around. Here’s what we found…

Here’s how it looks in today’s Village Voice…

Joseph Altuzarra For the Wall Street Journal

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I haven’t done a real how-to blog post in a while, but the shoot we did last week of Hot fashion designer of the moment, Joseph Altuzarra, for the Wall Street Journal ‘Weekend Confidential’ feature sort of lent itself to that sort of thing. Both portraits we did look ridiculously simple, but it’s the little details that go into shoots like this where I get asked the most amount of questions. Questions about my lighting choices, color balance and post processing. I kinda take all this stuff for granted, but I’ll pull back the curtain and try to break them down for you…

The inspiration for our first portrait sort of hit me right away when I checked out Joseph’s showroom and saw these two mannequins…

I was immediately struck by both the starkness of their design and the beautiful way the soft light from a wall of windows in the studio wrapped around the faces against the white walls. But as beautiful as Joseph’s designs were, I sort of want to simplify things even more…and that meant getting rid of the clothes…

We positioned the mannequins in the largest open space in the showroom…

…and to mimic that soft wall of light from the windows, I decided to light the set with two 65″ white umbrellas plugged into 2000 w/s Elinchrom packs, set up 90 degrees to the camera (and almost 20 feet from the subject) for a split-light effect…

This was our first test shot (with Robert standing in for Joseph) just using the two umbrellas…

Honestly, for a first test it was very nice. It fit the ‘Weekend Confidential’ requirements of being graphic and powerful, while also immediately telling the story. This was exactly how I wanted to portray Joseph. But technically it just a little too soft, flat and monochromatic for my liking. Those two umbrellas essentially made one big, even light source, but although Joseph and the mannequins would be exposed properly, the brightness of white mannequins was too much. I needed to bring up the light on the subject without affecting the mannequin’s light. So I added a 20″ Profoto Beauty Dish on a Profoto Acute 1200 pack, with a 30 degree grid, for just a little more light at the center of the scene…

As you see in the lighting diagram, by positioning the Beauty Dish in front of the umbrellas and feathering it so that it hits my subject but stays off the mannequins, it brings up the light on the subject just enough to separate him from the rest of the set. But I also wanted to shift the overall color palate because ‘normal’ just wasn’t cutting it! Since I always shoot tethered to Capture One Pro with the Hasselblad/Leaf back, I have a lot of options when it comes to selecting ICC input profiles. Leaf has always had the best designed input profiles that allow me to do what I did next. I switched from the basic ‘LF3 Portrait 5’ profile (very neutral, very normal) to my favorite profile…’LF3 Portrait Warm 5′. Warm 5 heightens the contrast and saturates colors, and because of that, our next test looked like this…

The new input profile allowed me to lower my white balance from 5100K down to 4150K which gave me a cool, blue overall look, but the skin tones remained pleasant without me having to add a warming gel to the Beauty Dish. Next, using the Capture One ‘Color Editor’ control panel, I was able to further adjust the blue and cyan channels to make them even more saturated, and also was able to improve on the skin tone in the red and yellow channels. Now it’s certainly possible to do this kind of thing in post using Photoshop, but with the Leaf input profiles and adjustment panels, I’m not only able to see the effect as I’m shooting, but it cuts down on my post processing a ton! You can also see how the addition of the Beauty Dish brings up the light on my subject so that he stands out better.

With my prelight & Capture One setup nailed, I think we’re ready to get Joseph on set…

Before we finished, I switched from the 80mm to the 150mm lens that compressed the perspective further and lowered the output on the umbrellas by about half a stop that slightly darkened the mannequins and allowed Joseph to stand out even more…

Next, we had set up a thunder grey backdrop for some seamless portraits…

It doesn’t get any simpler than this…one big, soft light source (a 47″ Rime Lite Grand Box) placed on a boom stand about 2.5 feet above his head. No fill, no tricks. Here’s how it looked on Robert…

Again, that first test shot looks pretty good, but we can still improve on it with a few easy adjustments. All we had to do was lower the white balance from 4650K down to 4150K, tweak the Levels and Curves a bit, add a little shadow detail and pull in a bit of vignetting on the corners and we were ready to go…

Finally, here is the story as it appeared in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal ‘Review’ Section…

The 2017 Barron’s Roundtable

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When January rolls around, one constant for the past decade has been the crew from Damn Ugly Photography has gotten to load a couple of thousand pounds of gear into a small room at the Harvard Club to shoot the members of the annual Barron’s Round Table. The basic formula is always the same. We start shooting at 8:00AM as the folks arrive. We have to shoot them separately since we need to be able to move each person around into whatever situations we’ve cooked up…and we have to be completely finished by 10:00AM since that’s when their all-day meeting begins. In that time we have to come up with images that will run on three consecutive covers in January, plus the cover for the mid-year report in June, as well as inside feature photos for all issues. Easy, right?!!

Adrian DeLucca and I wanted this year’s theme centered on the year itself…2017…and we came up with the idea to place the Roundtable members into the year 2017. To do that, I had to come up with the perfect 2017. I always liked the numbers on the Damn Ugly World Headquarters building…

So that seemed like a good place to start. I found similar numbers and went about shooting them…

But the silver seemed too passive…red spray paint was definitely called for…

Numbers…done. Now onto the moving parts. Our setup this year was actually much simpler than previously years. We only had two separate sets, one for the January issues and a second for the midyear.

I had a couple of 2017 ‘cheats’ taped to the gobos on our main set to help me keep track of where to place people…

Everything got dialed in pretty quickly (that ripped seamless in the background is a teaser for the midyear cover, so I can’t say any more about that for a while) and we were ready to get started.

Makeup artist Margina Dennis, Kaz playing digital tech and Adrian looking happy…

Kaz holding up Brian Rogers…

Oscar Schafer shooting Jeff Gundlach…

To get people into the correct positions, we used a few very simple props. Brian had to lean into the ‘1’…

Mario was standing inside the ‘0’…

Abby was holding up the ‘7’…

And Oscar would be laying back into the ‘7’ for the Week 3 cover…

After a few days at the computer, here’s how things turned out…

Week One Cover and Inside Opener…

Week Two Cover and Inside Opener…

Week Three Cover and Inside Opener…

And finally, here are the printed pages…

I Got To Wear Gay Talese’s Hat…

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Gay Talese. In the Hall of Fame of Great American writers, few are more iconic or more respected than Gay Talese. From his early work as a newspaper reporter to his time during the hey day of Esquire magazine and his long career writing some of the best nonfiction you’ll ever read, this man has seen and done it all…and with more style than you’ll ever have! Laura Baer recently had me shoot him for a feature in New Jersey Monthly…a shoot that ended with me wearing the great man’s hat!

Upon arriving at his townhouse, we immediately noticed the silk-covered settee framed by silk curtains in the front window…

It didn’t really require much lighting…but I added a 6′ Chimera for an overall soft fill behind the camera, and positioned a gridded 3′ ProFoto RFI directly above the seat for our main light…

We waited out the harsh sunlight coming through the windows, and when the outside light was just soft enough, things really got interesting…

The color shift from direct sunlight to open shade…and the blue cast it caused on the drapes…gave us a wonderful, cool mood that played off the warm tones of the settee, curtains and his suit.

Next, we set up a little studio in his back yard for some tighter portraits…

…which gave us this…

Here’s how it looked in print…

Say My Name

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I’m gonna keep this behind-the-scenes look fairly short and sweet…kinda like my time with Bryan Cranston…because I think the portraits will sort of do all the heavy lifting. Ronnie Weil needed Mr. Cranston shot for Alexandra Wolfe’s ‘Weekend Confidential” feature in the Review section of the Wall Street Journal and I was happy enough to oblige. Here’s how we set up our pop-up studio at the London Hotel for what turned out to be a pretty great morning…

Unlike a lot of the hotel shoots I find myself in, the London gave us a pretty nice (and large) space to work with…nice enough that I was able to break out some of my really BIG guns…the 79″ Rime Lites…

Here’s how things looked with Robert standing in…

That set would allow me to do everything from full length to tight portraits, but I wanted to also have a more controlled lighting setup for another portrait, so we pulled out the beauty dish…

Here’s Kaz posing as fast as he can…

Alright…we’re ready to go. Mr. Cranston, you’re on!

Next, I broke out my favorite antique posing stool…

After a very quick 5 minutes…with his publicist doing the countdown mambo behind me…we moved over to the second set…

…and played around with the shadow and light on his face, getting progressively darker and moodier as we went along…

And here is the final story as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal…

And for you Breaking Bad fans, here’s a little Badfinger to play us out…

BADFINGER: BABY BLUE

Life is good when you love what you do…..

The Federation Of Black Cowboys

This was one of those situations that shows you never know where the flow of your career is gonna take you. Andrew Horton…the Creative Director at The Village Voice…asked if I wanted to shoot some Black Cowboys…in Queens. The Federation of Black Cowboys is a group of urban cowpokes whose goal is to promote knowledge of the “Black West”. Their Ponderosa for the past two decades is a ramshackle stable just off Conduit Boulevard in Howard Beach, but recently their membership has dwindled to around 20 die-hards and now they face losing the license agreement for the stables. Andrew and I wanted my portraits to capture a gritty, iconic essence of what it is to be a Cowboy…and we also agreed that our touchstone style should be an homage to Richard Avedon’s In The American West. So off to Queens we went…

Unlike Avedon, I wasn’t going to drag out the 8×10 and set up a North-Light studio in the shadow of a barn…

Instead, we decided to make a huge wall of soft light by putting up the biggest lights I own…

The only problem is, when you fly a 79″ parabolic light in 25mph wind as we had that day, the shit hits the fan awfully fast. Even with over 100lbs of sandbags on each 50lb Matthews Stand, it was like trying to hold down a racing sailboat in a Regatta! But I didn’t care…Kaz had to deal with it…

But our basic setup was pretty similar to Avedon’s…a simple white seamless set up on the North side of one of the stables…

And here’s how things turned out…

Arthur “J.R.” Fulmore…

“Mama” Kesha Morse…

“Mountain Man” Ellis Harris…

Even though we had always conceived the shoot as a high-contrast Black & White series, we still wanted to see how things looked in color…

…but in the end, the B&W was just too strong, and here’s how it looks in this week’s Village Voice…

Thanks to Andrew for giving me the opportunity to hang with some real cool cats…and special thanks to J.R., Kesha and Mountain Man for opening up the stables to a Dude from the City…

Activist Investors & Bank Presidents For American Banker

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We just did back-to-back covers for American Banker…here’s how it went…

First, we headed to Morristown NJ to shoot Rich Lashley of PL Capital. Upon arrival, we found that PL Capital runs a pretty close-to-the-bone operation…which meant the entire place was two small offices and an equally small reception area. It was pouring that day, so shooting outside was outta the question, but we had to get creative fast. We cleared out as much of the reception area as possible and set up under a framed newspaper from the day of the Stock Market Crash of 1929…

…which gave us this series…

…for the feature opener…

Then we dropped a seamless for a bit of color…

But then I noticed Rich had a bright green baseball bat leaning against the wall…and besides the green looking great on that purple seamless, the metaphor of him being an ‘activist’ investor wielding a bat was just to good to pass up…

The cover…

A couple of weeks later we jumped on the Turnpike for a day trip to Wilmington Delaware to shoot Mark Turner, the President and CEO of WSFS Financial Corp. As soon as we got off the elevator we were greeted with a floor to ceiling bank of windows…

That was kind of a no-brainer. They also had a lot of this kinda stuff all over the walls…

But first we’d get a simple one-light seamless portrait out of the way…

Now to tackle those windows…

I figured on only needing one light for this, but the hot reflection on the window frames bothered me, so we put a grid on the mini-octa to focus the light more on him and keep it off the window…

With that reflection taken care of, we could get under way…

Finally, we had to try to make that ‘Word Wall’ exciting…

We succeeded…

Enya

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One of the best things about doing what I do is not knowing where I’m gonna be tomorrow, so when Dana Kien at the Wall Street Journal asked if I wanted to shoot Irish singer Enya, there was no hesitation when I said ‘Yes!”. She was going to be in New York to promote her new album and I could get an hour with her at her hotel between interviews and TV gigs. So Robert and I loaded up the van and drove downtown to the St. Regis Hotel…

I didn’t know what kind of suite we would have to work with, but I did know all of the rooms at the St. Regis face North, so we would probably have lots of soft window light to play with. And when we got there, the first thing I did was see how Robert looked with nothing but that available light…

Well…that was easy…now what else can we do?!! The bedroom was pretty opulent complete with a nice, velvet wallpaper…

…and I also brought a lavender seamless that I could drop for a variation…

…that looked like this…

I think we’re ready to go! And as cute as Robert was, I knew Enya would bring a bit more to the table…

Next we pulled the seamless outta the way, added a pillow from the bed for her to lean on and pulled back a lot on the clarity to soften things up…this is how it looked…

Now let’s move onto the windows…

You’ll notice that I got rid of those windows across the street…it just makes everything look a lot cleaner and more elegant.

And here’s the page from today’s Wall Street Journal…

Thanks to Dana for the great shoot…and thanks to Enya for letting me turn her suite into a studio for an hour!

Hamilton In ‘Da House!!!

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OK…let’s get this outta the way right off the bat…

No, I did not get tickets to Hamilton!

Now…on with the show……

My string of extremely cool shoots for Arrive Magazine continued when Rob Smith offered up Lin-Manuel Miranda for a cover feature on the ‘Hamilton’ writer and star. The story was tied to the productions donation of 20,000 $10 tickets to High School students so they see private matinees of ‘Hamilton’ that also includes a Q&A with the cast afterwards. It’s all done with the hope that it will get students to enjoy learning history…and what better way to get teens to enjoy history than to have them rapping the incredibly infectious songs from the musical after they leave the theater?!! And for one of our main photos we would be shooting Lin-Manuel with a group of students!

There were of course the usual difficulties of a shoot like this…very limited shoot time…having to do a union call which besides being crazy expensive, meant we couldn’t even plug in a light or move as much as a clamp without having a Hamilton crew member do it for us…to not even knowing what kind of wardrobe Lin-Manuel would be wearing before he arrived. Then there was the fact that I had a wild chest cold that made me feel like death and took 90% of my voice away! But hammer on we must…

On the location scout we decided on a few locations…

A view from the stage for our shot with Lin-Manuel and the kids…

The back wall of the stage for a portrait…

And a corner up in the mezzanine that would work great for our cover…my editor Leigh Flayton was giving her acting chops a workout…

The ‘Hamilton’ wine being served in the Mezzanine Bar…

Since we are going to have very little time for our shots, we had to pre-light each shot in advance…that was a lotta light! We had three separate setups on the stage alone, as well as the cover we were doing up in the mezzanine…

Most of these lights were for the opening shot of Lin-Manuel with the kids…

But you can see the setup against the ‘rope wall’ in the background…

Rob and I checking out the opening shot…with some of the union crew approving in the back…

Here’s our first shot with stand ins for the opener…

…and how things got looking better when the ‘talent’ showed up…

But once we got the lighting dialed in a bit more, the final shot for the opener dazzled…

Next was our ‘rope wall’ shot. Since Matt and Lin-Manuel were about the same height, he got to be the stand in…

Then we dropped a seamless for a tight portrait. I wanted something a little darker and moodier, so we kept things pretty contrasty…and I tweaked the color way into the blue spectrum which made Matt’s baby-blues even dreamier than normal…

For Lin-Manuel I backed off a bit cuz I liked the shadow we were getting on the background…

Finally, we raced upstairs for the cover. It’s pretty hard to describe how tight this location was, and unfortunately we didn’t have the time to do any behind-the-scenes shots, but Lin-Manuel was stuck into the corner and I was no more than four feet away shooting between the railing of a very dark stairway with the widest lens I had!

Once again, I chose to shift the color balance towards the blue end of things since I didn’t really like how the dead green/cyan of the wallpaper was looking. I also popped the saturation of the gold quite a bit in CaptureOne which really made those frames stand out…

And here’s how it all turned out…

And I wasn’t kidding earlier…I still haven’t seen ‘Hamilton’…..but these kids did!!!

The Human Face of Big Data – The Book & the Film…

I got an email this afternoon reminding me that ‘The Human Face of Big Data’…Rick Smolan’s look at how the rapid emergence of digital devices is affecting our lives…will be airing tonight at 10:00PM Eastern on PBS (check local listings). And that reminded me that I actually did one of the shots that was featured in the book. Rick had me shoot Josh Koppel, the CEO of ScrollMotion…an App developer that has created mobile content for most of the world’s largest publishers. ScrollMotion basically ‘teaches’ Old Media how to use New Media. The funny thing is that when you enter their offices, it’s like going to a museum of Pre-Digital Technology! Every single inch of the wall space is filled with magazine cover, record albums, movie posters and newspaper clippings…

…and especially Josh’s office…

My mission was clear…show what the place was like and the rest would fall in place. We figured that couch with the wall full of Nostalgia behind it was the place to start. Since Josh lives on his iPad, I wanted to play that off the wall of old printed material. But I needed to make the iPad the hero. It kind of had to be the focal point of the photo. It had to shine…and I had just the right thing…my little battery powered Morris Mini Slave units…

The Mini Slaves are small…really small…and if he held one in his hand at just the right angle it would appear that the iPad was lighting his face while also giving me a nice halo-glow. This is how we set it up…

I did a lot of cross-filtering with CTO and CTB tells to add to the mood. The Ring Light and Mini Slave were both wrapped in blue, while the beauty dish had a full CTO to warm up his skin and the wall behind him. There was a huge wall of windows on the left side that also let a lot of cool, blue light in. My first test was kind of right on…

Once we added Josh to the shot, all we had to do was get him to master holding the Mini Slave in the right place…

Here’s the final image in the book…

So anyway…you should check out the documentary tonight…watch the trailer here:

Turning The Barron’s Roundtable Into ‘The Minority Report’

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In the last episode of ‘Damn Ugly Photography’, we took a look at the first week of the 2016 Barron’s Roundtable Shoot…but now I’m gonna show you how I convinced our nine financial professionals to act as stand-ins for Tom Cruise in his movie, ‘The Minority Report’. You remember…this one…

Adrian Delucca and I had been tossing ideas around for months on how to make this work. I had to generate the floating graphs and other graphics that would be ‘moved around’, and we also had to come up with the perfect background images to position the people against…

…but probably the hardest thing would be how we could quickly get each Roundtable member to understand exactly what the final image would be and how to get them into position. Remember…I have less than ten minutes with each person and I had to shoot two other setups besides this one! I figured the smartest way around this would be to show them a pretty detailed mockup of our cover ideas with one of my assistants standing in, so on our setup day, I had Robert work his magic…

The lighting was super-simple…just a single Profoto 3′ RFI Octa bank way up high on a boom…and a couple of medium strip skim lights with blue gels to mimic the lighting from the background…

And the night before the shoot, I quickly Photoshopped this together…

Showing each person the print before we got started proved to be the exact thing they needed to illustrate what we wanted them to do…

Now we just had to get them to do their best impression of Marcel Marceau without feeling too self conscious…

Point up at the graph…uhhhh….hand…..

Here are a few of the raw images…

And now comes the fun part…editing through the 1000 images I took to find the few I can use that will actually look like everyone was in the same place at the same time. Then, floating all the graphs in place while remembering I had to save lotsa room for cover headlines. Here’s how the Week Two cover came together…

First, the background image…made a bit fuzzier for perspective…

Now, add the people…

Then, the basic graphs…

Now I had to add in some shadows, haloes and color shifts to the graphs so they looked like the were actually floating in space…

Next I pasted in a few techie-looking graphics and charts…

I decided to tone down the blue of the background cuz it as taking away from the overall dark mood I was aiming for…

And finally I increased the contrast, desaturated the skin tones and added a glow around the fingertips…

Our final cover…

Using the same steps, I worked up another image for the opener…

The Week Three images came together pretty much the same…

For the final steps, I messed with the focus on the background cuz it was drawing attention away from the foreground and shifted the overall blue cast more towards cyan/green…

Here’s the Week Three cover…

…and the opener…

Now if all that Photoshop geek talk hasn’t put you to sleep and you’re hankerin’ for more, you can watch the layers progressions on both cover images in these two YouTube videos…and then I promise, no more Roundtable talk for a while…..

Week Two Cover Layers:

Week Three Cover Layers:

The 2016 Barron’s Roundtable Extravaganza – Part One

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As anyone who has visited Damn Ugly Photography on a regular basis knows, the first week of January is when we decamp for the warm embrace of the Harvard Club to shoot the annual Barron’s Roundtable. This year was no different, and apart from there being a few familiar Roundtable members missing and replaced with a couple of new guys, the formula remains the same. We have two hours to shoot each of the nine Roundtable members…separately since they all arrive at staggered times…with the objective being that we need enough varied poses to fabricate four individual covers (three in January and one more for the mid-year report in June) as well as four feature photos to open the story with each week. We start at around 8:00AM and have to be totally done by the time the meeting begins at 10:00. If the thought of shooting nine people for four covers and four openers in two hours isn’t daunting enough, we also have to get each Roundtable member to wrap their head our concepts for the covers immediately…and remember…these aren’t models. They’re financial professionals. Trying to get them to understand the varied poses I need so that I can manufacture a cover where they all look like they’re relating to each other is harder than any of the technical tricks we work on!

So here is how the shoot for the first week’s cover went…

Our Week One cover and opener revolved around this image of a World Map…

Using some old images of the Roundtable members from a previous shoot, I put together this comp…

…so when people arrived, I could quickly show them a visual representation of what we were going to do…

As usual, we have to set up multiple lighting sets for our different poses in a very small room…this time we had three individual sets…

…everything is in the same place…hair & makeup, three sets and a very small area where people can hang out until we get them on set…

For the cover, we wanted everyone to react to the people around them…people who weren’t there when we did the shoot…so Robert got to carry on imaginary conversations to get each persons attention aimed in the right direction…

We did luck out once when Bill Priest and Brian Rogers overlapped, so we shot them together…

…but for the most part, they had to wave their hands around like a weatherman in front of a green screen…

So my raw materials from this part looked like this…

Now I just had to pick the appropriate images where everyone looked like they were all together at the same time. Here’s how the cover got pieced together…

First, the base background image…

Next, the base image is flipped to make the floor, and I also de-focussed it so it looked more like a real reflection…

Now I could mess with the color & contrast for the combined background…

…and add a few people…

…and the rest follow…

…and finally, I added shadows and more color & contrast tweaks…

…which gave us our cover for Week One…

Now I could move on to the inside feature image. I stated with the same base image layer, but I destaurated the blue cast a bit and lightened the upper area so that we could overlay type onto it easier…

The inside poses needed to be a bit more serious, due to the recent instability of the markets…

The ‘assembled’ group…

…the final image with shadows & color alterations…

…and our opening feature image…

So that was Week One. Tune in again next week to see how Adrian Delucca, Pam Budz and I put together Week Two & Week Three!

Patti Smith

Patti Smith.

That’s all Rob Smith…the Art Director of Arrive Magazine…said when he called me a few months back.

Patti. Motherfucking. Smith.

I said “Yes!” before he even had time to get another word out. Are you kidding? Of course I wanna shoot Patti Smith! Besides adding to my current string of portraits of iconic women…Judy Collins, Gloria Steinem, Misty Copeland…Patti is someone I have always been fascinated by, and having the opportunity to shoot her would be a dream! The shoot would be tied in with the release of her new book, M Train. But then Rob had more to add…

No Hair and Makeup…

No Styling…

We’d get half an hour from the time she arrived at the studio…not a second more.

Fine..done…it would be a challenge, but I didn’t care…let’s get on with it!

I originally booked a studio in Long Island City because it had lots of character…but a week later Patti’s publicist nixed it saying Patti didn’t want to cross the river. She said Patti lived in the West Village and that she liked shooting at Industria. OK…less character, but if it makes Patti happy, we’ll book Industria. So more than a month goes by and it’s now about a week before the shoot date and I call the publicist and ask if we’re still on track to shoot and if we can confirm the studio…“Sure…we’re all set!”, she says…and I confirm Industria. But then a few days later…only three days before our shoot…she calls back to say that Patti now doesn’t want to shoot in a studio…she wants to do the shoot at Penn Station! She apparently had written a lot of her book while riding the Acela train and liked the metaphor of shooting at Penn Station since we were shooting for Amtrak’s magazine. But besides the fact that canceling Industria meant we would lose about $2 Grand…exactly how were we gonna shoot in the departure lounge of the busiest train station in America on three days notice?!! Without getting into detail, I’m just gonna fast-forward past the conference calls, begging and hand-wringing that ensued, and say that somehow we were given permission. And so on an extremely hot August afternoon, myself and my crew took over Penn Station…

Patti wanted the Departure Board…she gets the Departure Board…

…but even though I lost my studio aspect of the shoot, I figured we could still set up a smallish backdrop off to the side…

The two areas were only a few feet apart, but the Penn Station folks were still kinda freaked out when they saw the size of our setup!

But I didn’t care…I was shooting Patti Smith, dammit!

Now let’s move over to that backdrop…

And then…just as we were pretty much finished…something truly magical happened…

Those kids sticking their heads around the corner might be the best happy accident I’ve ever photographed.

For one final setup, I pulled back the curtain to show the overall set and exactly where our little popup studio was…

Here’s how everything looked in ‘Arrive’…

So even though we were thrown more curveballs than I had seen in a year, everything worked out in the end…

Drinking A Few Beers With DW Gibson

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DW Gibson is a writer and journalist whose work appears in publications like the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Village Voice & The Daily Beast and is also a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. And over the past few years, he’s written extensively about New Yorkers who’ve been affected by gentrification. Here’s a little behind the scenes of my shoot for WirtschaftsWoche…one of my European clients…when they asked if I could shoot him in his own rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn…

Kaz and I started with a pretty simple setup in between DW’s house and his next door neighbors. I liked the way the design of the houses showed the type of architecture the neighborhood was comprised of, and it also allowed me to do one of my ‘Artificial Portraits’, since my editor at WiWo had specifically asked me to do at least one setup that showed my lighting kit…

Did I mention it was about 100 degrees the day we were shooting? DW was very gracious and offered beer to keep us cool…

Next, we crossed the street for a couple of portraits against a brick wall…

…and finally finished off with some views of his street…

…which opened our story…

Misty Copeland’s New Website Is Damn Ugly…

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Misty Copeland’s new website just went live, and there are a surprising number of Damn Ugly photographs taking up space…

I’ve been working with Lisa Clayton at Starving Artist Web Design who did all the heavy lifting with the layout of the new site…especially the inventive way she Photoshopped that swirling red skirt onto my shot for the home page…Bravo!!!

Bill Nighy Is Way Cooler Than You

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Bill Nighy is cool. Throughout the meandering flow of his career he’s played a vampire, a wizard, an aging, sleazy burnout rock star, a nazi, a time traveler and even Davy Jones with an Octopus face! Whatever he’s in, he’s the coolest guy on the screen. And he wears a suit really well, too. When he arrived at the Golden Theater…where he was starring in Skylight with Cary Mulligan…for our Wall Street Journal shoot, he just oozed cool…that bespoke suit, his perfect diction, his silky smooth attitude…I thought to myself…he’s the King of Cool.

And…off we go…

The mezzanine of the Golden had lotsa space for Julien and Kaz to assemble our pop-up studio…

And a quick 45 degree turn to the left offered up a wonderful second shot…

Here’s how everything turned out…

I wanna be cool like Bill…

Pullin’ Out The Bull & Bear Costumes For Barron’s

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It’s June, and that means I hafta jump back on the Photoshop Horse and put together another cover story using elements from our January shoot of the Barron’s Roundtable members for the Mid-Year Issue. Adrian Delucca and I thought it might be fun to once again make use of those very expensive Bull and Bear costumes we had made for the 2014 cover, but this time the idea would be to have our mascots walking hand-in-hand down Wall Street. Sounds easy. It isn’t. For a whole mess of reasons, shooting ‘live’ down on Wall Street was never gonna happen. Forget about the expense of shooting this type of thing on location, just try to shoot on Wall Street when there aren’t a million people milling around! No…this was gonna be much more manageable shot in pieces…

First off, we had to shoot a ton of variations of the Bull and Bear in the studio that I could drop into my Wall Street photo. To save a few bucks on models, Adrian and Assistant Photo Editor Jenna Bascom elected to get all sweaty in the mascot suits…

…how about a ‘selfie’?!!

Next, I had to shoot our empty Wall Street scene. Shooting on weekdays were out, since Wall Street folks are already filling up lower Manhattan before the Sun rises, so that meant an early morning weekend shoot. Almost every weekend of March and April was either too damned cold or rainy (or on one Saturday when I arrived at 6:00AM, the street was filled with Jodie Foster, George Clooney, Julia Roberts and about 200 grips setting up a film shoot!), but I finally got off a few frames of a relatively empty street and Stock Exchange building…

Now I had to get rid of any people and other extraneous crap out of the background and stretch it out a bit (and make it square) to fit Barron’s format…

…then throw the buildings a bit out of focus for perspective…

But the early morning grey look wasn’t working, so I sparkled things up a bit…

And it was finally ready for our Bull and Bear…

Throw in some final color & contrast adjustments, a few shadows and more Photoshop magic…and voila!!!

For the cover images, besides the portraits we did for the Chess theme, we quickly shot a few individual portraits of each Roundtable member on a neutral seamless…

…a quick Photo-Bomb…

The idea was to insert them into Financial District street scenes…here are a few of the results…

Mario Gabelli:

Marc Faber:

Bill Gross:

…and the final cover…

And we’ll do it all again next January!

	Rose on Tiny Room Portraits Of Mohamed…
	Erin F on Photographing The Maestro…
	Noemi Castro-Feinste… on R.I.P. Marty Forscher
	Bonnie on At Home With Judy Collins
	Teti on At Home With Judy Collins

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