Cameron Experiment

I shot a two very different women for a couple of editorial assignments this week, and it reminded me that one of the best parts about my job is meeting and talking with my subjects.  People pay me to meet and take portraits of interesting people.  That’s pretty cool.

In other news, I’ve been staring at a book of Julia Margaret Cameron photos for the past week.  If you haven’t seen her work, make a point of it.  Not that I’m enthralled by all of it, but it’s amazing that there was woman taking portraits like she did about 150 years ago.  First off because at the time it was a very misogynistic world in europe, and secondly because many of the photos have such a timeless quality, that they honestly look like they could be of subjects from the 1960’s and 70’s.

To that end, here are a couple very short depth of field shots of my friend Omer using only some evening window light. I didn’t do any photoshop work to these, I wanted to ignore my normal post-processing regimen for a while. They were desaturated and such in Lightroom.  Makes me want an 85/1.2 to get even more of that large format bokeh look.

Craig Ward

London type master, and terribly nice guy, Craig Ward of www.wordsarepictures.co.uk

Kevin

Mary, after she was done with her Harry Carey impression

Hancock Tower

Always my favorite building in Boston, now bite-size for your consumption.

Tim

B-Side Black and White Portraits

The light wasn’t great, but you leave with the girl that brung ya.

Done. And some shots of Owen.

I’m back, and done.

4 days of shooting, 24 people from 3 orchestras, at 3 locations, with over 3000 images to show for it.  It was a marathon, but in the end I’d say it went about as well as it could possibly have.  Everyone got along, everything went smoothly. Couldn’t have done it without my producer Marlene, Meg my assistant, and PA’s James and Kevin. As well as Jennifer, Carlos, Larissa, and everyone else at the agency. <cue applause>

At the end of day 3, I shot a cello player from the BSO named Owen Young. He was such a nice guy that when were done I pulled him over to a window, picked up the backup body and snapped off a dozen frames just for me.  Three of those shots are below.

Update Number Two

So, day two of this four day shoot was completed on Thursday, this time on-site in Saratoga Springs where the Philadelphia Orchestra spends their summers.  And just like the first shoot on tues, all of the people I met were delightful.  My side of the crew was the same with the addition of James and Kevin who worked as PA’s and drivers and such. It was nice having a couple extra pairs of hands when things needed to get done, as there was more driving and larger instruments this time.

When we met up with the boys as I’ll call them, I did a quick double check of the equipment they picked up from the rental house, and sure enough we had packs but no heads, so we had to make a pit stop at fotocare before getting on the road.  As is turns out, ultimately the fault was mine, I didn’t have them on the list. One of those “staring straight through” the obvious stuff.  No harm, no foul. That’s what double checks and teamwork is for.

In the last shoot we worked in a big New York studio, but this time we setup on the stage of a theatre.  It was just big enough for our setup width wise and everything came together quickly.  However after a few test shots I noticed a little problem.  You see, in the studio there was a white floor and walls, and so I had a de facto reflector on the far side of the subjects filling in the shadows.  However here on the stage, there was nothing to bounce some of the light back onto the other side, just a whole lot of cubic feet of really dark air.  So Meg and I fashioned a quick solution by clamping a white tablecloth to a clothing rack we borrowed from the wardrobe person (thanks Patty).  It worked fine, but obviously I would have rather seen it coming.

Lightroom 2 was released last week and runs pretty well.  The adjustment brush is a great idea and could prove very useful trying to tame RAW data even before it gets rasterized into a PhotoShop file. However I’ve found that it’s a little sluggish when painting in the adjustments, and I’ve got some pretty beefy machines.  We’ll see if it improves. More about my thoughts on Lightroom 2 when I get back from Lenox later this week.

The reason I brought Lightroom up is that I used the automasking features to desaturate the green screen paper to grey for the selects before I send them to the client.  And it took no time at all.  Just choose Saturation in the HSL panel > click the little handle icon to activate the tool and then click and drag down anywhere on the green and presto, you shot on grey paper.  I’m very impressed, and it makes the images much easier to visualize in the final composite.

On my next big shoot, I’d also like to try double diffusing my light. I’m using a 60″ softlighter for my key, but I see a lot of people in shoot videos sticking a scrim or diffuser between a softbox and the subject..  I need to play with that.

At the end of the day, a few of us where invited to to see the orchestra play.  It was a pops night and it was a program of movie scores. So I walked over mid-concert with a couple of my co-workers and we caught 15 minutes of it before we had to hop in the car to head home. A full orchestra playing live outdoors in a lovely setting on perfect summer night as a special magic.

So, in the end I learned to always check the equipment before getting on the road, tableclothes are my friend, Lightroom’s automask is very handy, and that the Philadelphia Orchestra can play.  Ok, I already knew the last one.

Off to Lenox, MA tomorrow, more updates in a day or so.  Someday, hopefully, I’ll get to show you the fruits of all this labor. 

A Quick Update – my back hurts

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I was away with the family last weekend and now I’m in the middle of a multi-day job. I figured that I’d give you an update and let you in on how it’s going.

So, yesterday I had the first shooting day of a four day shoot for an advertising campaign I’m working on. I’m shooting musicians on a green screen, which is fun, and I must say that if they’re all like the 6 I shot yesterday this whole process is going to be a really nice experience. Everyone, especially the players who flew into NYC for this, were great. That said, I’m exhausted, or rather I was when I got home yesterday about 12 hours after I left in the morning. Standing and talking and shooting for hours on end while trying to keep your attention at 100% is really draining, and I don’t like coffee so I don’t have that little crutch. Plus my back is screaming at me.  Time to load up on ibuprofen. Better still, later this afternoon I’ve got to get in a car to drive for 3.5 hours to get to the next location for tomorrow.

I’m shooting tethered with a 1DsIII to a macbook pro, Canon remote software with Lightroom picking up the RAW files automatically as they’re dropped onto the hard drive. It takes about 10 seconds for each 22MB RAW image to transfer and show up which is a little annoying, but it’s certainly a more instant feedback than film would be and at least you get to see the image on the screen. I’ve heard that the camera to computer transfer time is much faster on a windows box (which I usually use), something to do with inefficient USB drivers in OSX. I went to go use bootcamp to install vista and try to get that boost, but the DVD drive on the macbook pro won’t read half the disks I insert, so I guess I’m stuck on this gig.

I’ve shot about 100+ images or so of each person. Trying to come up with and capture interesting ‘poses’ or expresions which will be useful in the post production phase of the process. My big thing is trying to make it a comfortable experience for the subjects because that’s how I get a portrait of that person and now just a picture of some guy playing violin. To that end, I like to keep it largely one-on-one, with the clients and other gaggle of agency people and the like not right there watching while I shoot. I’m happy to show them work at intervals, but this is a case of where too many cooks really does spoil things. Makes the subject feel like they’re on trial.

After everyone (the client team, art director, me, and anyone else who happens to want to weigh in) is happy with the images from each subject, my assistant copies the RAW onto a couple external drives just in case all hell breaks loose. BTW, I needed a couple drives for the shoot and so went to techserve the other day and picked up a couple 250GB Lacie Little Disk drives for $139 a piece. Not the cheapest for bus powered little drives, but they’re bost USB2 and Firewire which we’ve found is substantially faster for this kind of thing.

Most of them are wearing black, so I’m exposing to the right when I can to try to minimize the amount of noise in the material and shadows, and then pulling back the exposure a half a stop or so in Lightroom. It seems to be working. Unfortunately most of the men are also wearing white shirts which means I’ve got to be careful not to blow out the highlights on the other end of the spectrum.

That’s about it for now, but I’ll come back with more tales of the shoot tomorrow.
We’ll be back to regular posts and programming soon enough.