Luckily for me I have a great client and friend(s) in the folks at Kissaneviola www.kissaneviola.com.  Kissaneviola is a regionally based and nationally recognized website design firm.  They use me for just about anything they need a photographer for.  Thanks guys!  My last assignment for them was to shoot a restaurant.  WAIT! food photography, ambiance, the chef?  Really?

Now, I use artificial light from time to time, generally to add a little extra something to a natural light scene, but this particular restaurant is in a below ground location and this would be an ALL artificial light scenario.  Well, someone has to pay the bills, and I approached this shoot as  a particular challenge, that I could learn from.  A challenge that would push me as a photographer.  Sure, I studied photography in school and yes I learned all sorts of artificial lighting techniques but I’m in my 40s and that was 20+ years ago.

What a blast, once again I was using my camera, to make a living (how cool is that) and loving every minute of it.  Food photographers get to eat everything.  Here are a few samples of the work.  How’d I do?

Dessert

Sommelier

Dining Room

So with budgets dropping and the opportunities dwindling I, and I’m guessing many other photographers, are left with the more frustrating assignment of creating images for clients who aren’t quite sure what they want or where they’re going to run them.  Not that much fun really, and it’s all about having fun.

My remedy for these mild headaches again points to my personal work.  When I go out and shoot something without an assignment, I create one for myself.  Sometimes I’ll even sketch out a layout.  This gives me the opportunity to shoot for a layout….in a way.  I consider it good practice, I continue to enjoy my profession and most importantly I continue to grow as a photographer.

My latest (job) was for my friend’s ski clothing accessories company.  I chose to shoot for a web banner format.

A personal photo created for a web banner format layout.

a shot for a bike racing team

I think what it really comes down to is “why is a photographer a photographer?”  and the answer is different for every photographer.  Consider why you want to be a photog, the passion, the money, the fame.  I chose photography because from a very early age I found cameras and lenses and printing (remember that?) fascinating.  It turns out that my brain and heart were well suited for the art part as well.  I’ve chosen photography as a lifestyle choice, fewer days at work and more time to play.  With this decision made I chose to be as diversified in the subject matter I shoot (and get paid to shoot) as possible.  That’s not to say that I don’t consider myself mildly niched as a adventure lifestyle shooter but rather to say that I love to create great photos for cool clients and the fact that I get paid to do it amazes me everyday.  It’s a great feeling to do what you love and get paid for it too.  So I went with “the passion” and I just shoot and shoot and shoot.  I’m never New York’s flavor of the day but I pay the bills with my camera and I enjoy it.  I shoot corporate, editorial and add work, portraits, action and food and music and….

a shot for a pool hall

Many of my less diversified colleagues have now found themselves left out to dry with the flat economy. Let’s face it if you’re a niche guy it’s like having all of your eggs in one basket.  If “your” segment shuts its doors, even temporarily, your gonna go hungry.  Diversity has kept me busy in these super hard times.

Let’s also consider the creative benefits to being diversified.  In my book, keeping your camera in your hands is more valuable than any other aspects of the creative process.  When you’re used to shooting XGames crazies doing unimaginable tricks on a snowboard or a skateboard, shifting gears to creating

art out of a plate of food presents a formidable challenge throw a portrait of a corporate executive in the mix and you are, at that point using, all the regions of your creative process to get the JOB done.  Practice makes perfect!

a shot for a corporate client

I believe that it is important to have intention before you go out and shoot.  I often go as far as to break out the sketch book and sketch out my ideas before going on assignment.  I use the resulting sketches to open up the creative process let my brain puke all of my good and sometimes not so good ideas out on to the page.  This way I have something tangible to refer back to when I’m on location.

That said, the “actor shot” I referred to in my last post was not one that I took to the sketch books.  I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like from the second I agreed to the assignment.  I wanted the shot to look like it was shot in the scorching desert environment, sun in the frame, minimal earth and shot from below to give the subject the larger than life feel.  Very intentional.  Here’s how I did it.

This was an “actor shot,” and it needed to look like it was shot on the set of a movie, with real cinematic lighting.    Short of a Hollywood budget and seven trucks full of all the gear a guy could dream about, I’ll show you how to create cinematic lighting using only one artificial light.

The sun is a powerful player in this shot so let’s start there.  Place (your primary light source) the sun behind the subject and use its super atomic powers to create a rim light effect.  Expose for the rim highlight to be almost white.  This will create your ambient exposure.  You want this rim light to be almost blown out for this technique and that’s why we’re using the sun to do it, the sun is your most powerful light source.  When you have the sun as a light source go with it, fighting it will only cause headaches.

Cinematic lighting map

The sun behind your subject will leave your subject mostly backlit and in a silhouette.  Next, use an artificial light source (I like my new Elinchrom Ranger with a bare head) directly opposite the sun.  Balance this light to 1/3 of a stop just under the ambient exposure.  This will result in  bringing your subject just up out of the silhouette while leaving a shadow stripe right down the middle of his/her body.

The shadow stripe will look really weird but it means your just one step away from the goods.  The last step is to use the sun as your third light source as well as your primary.  Huh?  Now take a large reflector (I use a 8′x8′ ScrimJim) and bounce the sun into the subject to erase the shadow stripe and fill under Conan’s arm pits, eye sockets and buck teeth.  I knew from the start that when I put the image into the computer that I would color balance it to an amber tint so I used the gold reflector cloth.  Remember I wanted the whole thing to look hot, 110 degrees…..gold.

Remember to bracket your ambient exposure to play with the mood of the shot.

I hope you have fun with this one.

Cinematic lighting effects help create a winning shot of an actor.

So a friend of a friend came to TZPInc with a crazy if not small project and a reasonable budget to get it done.  The conversation started like this, “Hi, I’m a friend of so and so and I’m trying to be an actor and this guy is making a movie and he wants me to send him some photos…….”  Ouch!  How many photographers have heard this before, raise your hand!  I think I was bitter that day because it hadn’t been snowing which means I hadn’t been skiing, so I answered, “and let me guess you have 75 bucks?”  As it turns out the film company had given the guy a decent amount of dough to get the shot but still,  this type of thing really isn’t my gig.

The friend who sent this guy my way is a very good friend so I really wanted to help.  It was when the guy said, “they sent me a Conan costume and a sword for the shoot,”  that I was sure this was a portrait I’d have to shoot.  I scouted for cool location and scheduled the shoot for later in the week.

Any photo shoot is what you, the photog, chooses to make of it and the Conan concept had me totally inspired to make the most out of the shoot, push the envelope and shoot something I don’t get to do everyday. Yeah it was just and “actor shot” but I was going to spend the afternoon traveling to a far off land and battling barbarians.  Maybe it’s the kid in me but I had a blast creating this image.  I’ll do a follow up post, with a how to, on the cool cinematic lighting.

Do what you love, immerse yourself in passion, happiness awaits you!

PLG at the ESPN Summer X Games 15

For 6 years now I’ve been climbing on a airplane, during the heat of the summer, and heading off to LA.  What is this mountain guy thinking?  LA in August….it’s flipping hot.  I can’t resist, the reason I go, year after year, is to participate in the ESPN Summer X Games.  Now I’m not one of those nut jobs backflipping motos or boosting that giant vert ramp, of course, I’m a photographer.  I’m lucky enough to be one of ESPN’s staff photographers.  That means I possess a credential that allows me to go anywhere and do anything I want (in order to get the photos) as long as I don’t get on TV.

The X Games, winter or summer, is an incredible explosion of the best athletes in the world, hordes of their fans and TV craziness all packed into four days of sheer mayhem.  I love it, capturing the amazing energy of such a beautiful disaster is one of my favorite assignments of the year.  But, I’ve done that now for years so this year I decided  to search for a quite moment, a shot that might express an athlete’s drive and determination without all of the hubbub.

I created this image at an evening practice for the Men’s Skateboard Vert competition.  There was one athlete (Pierre-Luc Gagnon) who continued  to practiced well after all the other competitors and fans all went home.  The moment was exactly what I was looking for.  Quiet, serene, yet intense.  Gagnon went on to win the Gold, in front of his fans and the TV and all of the beautiful disaster.

Emily trail running in an Aspen forest.

Check it!  Cool!

Montenegro is a tiny country on the Adriatic Sea that is nestled between Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and Albania and despite its aggressive neighbors it managed to stay out of the Balkan wars.  I recently traveled there to shoot a story on spec with my buddy Simon Kelton author of the critically acclaimed The Rich Bastard’s Guide to Los Angeles.

Our intention was to scout the mountains of Montenegro for a spot to build a lodge and set up a helicopter skiing operation.  What? You thought I said some thing about a story…on spec?  Simon’s friend, a wealthy investor type, had a dream and……..you get it……Simon calls a few magazines, a photographer and a former champion slalom skier for the UK and next thing you know we’re in skiing Montenegro and writing/shooting a piece on spec for said magazines.  I love my life.

Shooting on spec is always a tricky concept for me to grasp.  As a general rule I believe that if you work your ass off you will create a strong body of work and come home with good, salable images and so you’ll do well in the end.  You’ll likely never match the multiple day rate, contract fees with the page rate sales but, let’s consider the flip side, you’ll be heli skiing in Montenegro and exploring a different part of the planet.  Shooting on spec can be a double edge sword.  If all photographers took all assignments “on spec,” we’d all be broke.    The last thing we need as photographers is for magazine to believe that they don’t need to pay creative fees and expenses.  It should be the magazines choice to take the risk on a piece and the photographer for that matter.  That’s why they have editors researching what type of stories will bring in the add revenue and that’s why photographers spend so much time learning there craft and promoting themselves.

That said, exploring new places inspires creativity in my work. I was particularly flat creatively at the time and I decided to use the Montenegro trip as a jump off point for a new perspective.  Hopefully.  And, oh yeah, did I mention the heli skiing part.

It worked!  Montenegro was an incredible place to visit and ski and upon my return to the States my mind was doing back flips full of new photo ideas. So, shooting on spec can be good but I suggest using sparingly.

Below is my favorite image from the Montenegro edit.  I shot tons of great skiing stuff but those images did nothing to really inspire my “new perspective.”  It was this image and the synchronistic flow of camera/universe blah blah blah that it took to create it that really opened my eyes.  While speeding up a canyon in a pair of military helicopters I noticed the reflection of the pilots shoulder patch (the Montenegrean crest) intersecting the second chopper outside.  The Montenegrean people are an extraordinarily proud people, it seemed a fitting image.

A Montenegrean military helicopter and the reflection of the Montenegrean crest.

I was given an assignment to travel on four wheel drive roads from Boulder, CO to Aspen, CO and document the trip and its adventures.  The photo editor a wanted true travel piece.  What a blast!  Very often my commercial assignments involve the single minded objective of representing the client’s product as the “amazing, best and only…thing…you need in your life”.

I looked at the Boulder to Aspen story as an opportunity to search for the subtleties in my surrounds.  The little pictures that make the world so wonderful.  Cliche maybe, but I had a blast.  Here ya go!  The rest of this story was published last summer in Forbes Life Mountain Time.

Simple story telling portrait of a local

Have you ever paged through the big travel mags and come across the photo of the local woman who is posing with some local fare?  You know the one the Jamaican woman with the tropical fruit framed against a pastel wall.

I love those portraits, they’re very simple and they tell a great story.  To me these portraits are such important parts of any travel piece for that very reason.  Simple story telling.

I recently got the opportunity to shoot such a shot while on assignment for Forbes Life Mountain Time when I was passing through the town of  Leadville, Colorado.

Sandra Gnant, the photo editor, had specifically asked for portraits of locals. Now, Leadville has an undeserving reputation as a surly place so I wanted just the right person and as the morning wore on I hadn’t yet found what I was looking for in a local.  As we sat down for lunch the waitress came around the corner and I knew I had my perfect victim.

With a little begging and the promise of a big tip I got her to stand for this.  I loved it as I was shooting it, I loved it in the edit and I still love it.  Sandra loved it, I hope you do too.