Tez Mercer Photography

After finally resolving the login issues I had (again) with my blog, it’s time to show you some more stuff and tell you how it went down yo.

You know by now that I shoot bands right? Well, that’s what this installment is about, and the next 2 installments too (hypothetically). The band in question today is The Farthest Edge. They’re really really really fuckin good. They have a Reverb nation site here: http://www.reverbnation.com/thefarthestedge The album is currently being mastered somewhere in NY and due for release into the GenPop sometime in 2012.

Now you know! Please mark your calendars accordingly.

If you’ve read this blog before you might be familiar with my MO of doing band shoots. First and foremost before we even get to the shoot we sit and talk about the concept, the look, if they have any specific shots in mind or whatever else, just something so we have a mutual starting point that we can expand upon as time progresses. I do this for every shoot, not just bands but everything. The reasons are twofold, not only do you get the client’s input on what you’re looking to do but you also get to speak to the client and they you so you get an easier relationship come shoot day. Obviously, this isn’t always possible, like in the next blog entry I’ll do which was entirely seat of the pants.

The stuff with TFE was a little different in that it wasn’t just shots of the guys looking cool in front of cool shit, I wanted to get a bigger picture of the band as a whole so we did another ’shoot’ from one of their practice sessions in a documentary kinda way. No lights, no production, no posing. Just a camera and a 50mm lens.

That’s rock n roll right there.

all with a 50mm at around F/2 or so. I use the 50mm 1.4, which at 1.4 and 1.8 is pretty much useless. F/2 is where things begin to get (very) sharp, just watch the focus cos the depth of field is tiny as, bro.

So yeah, that was a different look at a rock band, like some behind the scenes footage and it’s really really great to hear a riff, hear Pat add a vocal melody, sit down with a pad and paper, write some words, and turn an idea into a fully fledged monster. I heard some of their rough-mix tracks after this practice and it’s amazing to hear the riff you heard when Rich was noodling around transformed into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Speaking of Rich Candelaria- someone needs to endorse this guy. He’s seriously ridiculously good, better than most of the guys on the endorsee rosters of big name companies.

Say hello to Rich:

So Mr. Ibanez, Larry DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan etc, get in touch. He’ll make you look very good.

This was a spur of the moment shot at Rich’s request (damned good one too!). I had an innocent bystander hold a light about 2 feet above Rich, which I think was in an octabox, and took this shot at 24mm. The distortion/foreshortening is deliberate. If I took this at a longer focal length the fist wouldn’t look nearly as ‘close’ and the guitar neck wouldn’t elongate like it does to look longer. You can drastically change the effect by zooming in or out. And yes, that is a guitar covered in duct tape, like Randy’s guitar but one louder.

The Farthest Edge:

TFE

This shoot essentially had 2 parts to it. One was a ‘performance’ looking shoot and the other would be the promo/posed stuff. For the 1st part I wanted it to look like stills from a music video with a bunch of guys rocking out but looking awesome doing it. Like most shoots the rule of thumb is location, location, location. This one was the same. In keeping with TFE’s love of all things rock-star, this one took place in an air hangar. A massive, giant hangar full of very expensive jets (I think the one in the corner cost $20m), and a Humvee in the middle of everything. Very cool. Even before anything was set up it felt like a studio set.

I put a light to either side of the band, and just had it bare for maximum efficiency and also to get the hardest shadows (look on the floor). The plan was that those lights would provide a cool rim light no matter where I was shooting from which would really help to make the guys stand out against the (pretty dark) background. The front of the band was lit with a light in an octabox from the right of the set and about 10ft high angled slightly down. I wanted to get a big soft spread out of it to light everyone in the band but also to provide some shape to the faces etc- if light comes from the same direction of the camera it makes everything look 2d and not at all cool. On a shoot like this we need the motion and the dynamism to keep it looking interesting and like a music video.

One detail I like: the guitars are all plugged in. Convincing eh?

Anyway…

As well as the collective shots of the band, I always like doing individual shots of the guys in the band for use on album art, websites, whatever, indie shots are always handy to have. So we did it like this: they went through the song once and I did all the wide shots. They went through it again (twice) and we did the indie shots. Easy right?

Fo sho.

Portraits, but a different take. Each shot has its own lighting going on. I placed both of the rim lights slightly behind each subject and had a Voice Activated Light Stand follow me around with an octabox and hold it above each guy I was shooting at that time. Job done.

And that was the first part. Onto job number 2 and a wardrobe change.

Most of the lighting on these shots was done with a big soft light high overhead so it spreads over the group and also on the surroundings. I wanted it to look a little dark, a little seedy almost. Not bright and happy.

And there we have it. Great band. Check them out.

Thanks for reading

Editorial Shoot – Comet Skateboards for Concrete Wave magazine

Comet Skateboards. You can probably tell by their name what they’re all about: skateboards, and comets.

Specializing in longboards, Comet operate out of a small facility in the backwoods of Enfield, NY that handles all their production and distribution. When I say it’s a “hands-on” process, I mean it: Everything is meticulously checked, rechecked and crafted to exemplary  standards by a small team of dedicated people, mostly skaters themselves.

When I turned up for the shoot creation was in full swing- CNC machines routing, spray booths spraying, packages being packaged – with a stack of boxes ready to be shipped to South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, less exotic places on the domestic  West Coast and across the border to Canada.

At the helm of the operation is Jason Salfi, a long time advocate of longboarding and a flag-waving emissary of the sport and an individual who, as I gather, is widely known and respected in the scene the world over whose reputation is second only to his humility.

An unassuming individual, softly-spoken, yet with an intense gaze, Jason has developed and expanded Comet into the pioneering company it is today. A far cry from its humble beginnings.

This shoot was to provide the art for a spread on Comet that is to be featured in Concrete Wave magazine, which if you’re unfamiliar with, they are the leading publication involved with the longboarding scene and they have a reputation of high-quality artwork and a slick visual appeal. When I spoke to Mike Brooke, the man behind the magazine, he explained to me his wish to make Concrete Wave the “National Geographic of longboarding” and for all intents and purposes, the flagship of the sport and scene.

The article is to do with manufacturing in the USA and highlighting some of the local firms operating out of places you wouldn’t associate with the longboarding/skateboarding scene- such as Enfield, NY which is perhaps better known for its fields and vast spaces rather than for its baggy jeans and half-pipes. So, I got the call to make Jason and the Comet army look like badasses and also to get some shots of the manufacturing process in action.

So that’s what I did. I spent about 4 hours with the guys in the Comet plant doing some posed stuff for the group shots and then candid shots of the staff working.

For the group shots I was working a pretty big area, and therefore a big space to fill, so I needed a big spread of light to stop it from making it look like the people were spotlit. When I need to fill a big space, or to cover a big group I’ll use the octabox. You can also use a softbox if you have one, or a parabolic umbrella if you have one of those (and the space). It’s kind of an unwritten rule that the key light should be big enough to cover the subject(s) and this is true in any context – a watch, a model or in this case, a group of 4 guys looking cool.

But there was a little problem (or opportunity) with just the one light – it left the back of the frame completely black as it was only lit by a couple of small residential bulbs. Sure, I could have shot at a shutter speed of around 2 seconds to raise the ambient, but with moving people, shooting freehand and the different color temperatures in the scene this wouldn’t have been a very good course of action.

So, just like I discussed in the TC3 Bandwagon shoot some weeks ago, I broke down the scene into its component parts which are usually foreground/subject, middleground and background, or in this particular instance it was the team, the second room, and then the workshop at the back.

Of course, the easiest way would just be to change the shooting angle so that the frame only contained the team and then I wouldn’t have to worry about the background or anything else and I’d be all set… but that’s lazy and there’s a commitment to the client to do the best I can to make the shot look right. Plus, I wanted to tell the story in the frame, which you can’t really see in the small pic here but from this vantage point you can see the raw wood on the right, the spray booth in the background, the workshop where the decks are cut and shaped and in the foreground to the left are the boxes of finished product ready to be shipped. It’s a little detail but an important one and everything here adds to the shot as it all has something to do with the tale of Comet.

When I do shoots at someone’s place of work, or at a spot meaningful to them, I ask them not to move anything or “tidy anything up” because to me, I think it removes some of the inherent personality in a scene. Like when I shot Alex Nauman (a musician) at his studio, he kindly mentioned that he didn’t have the time to tidy up the stuff from the background (guitar cables, a stool and some pieces of note paper with lyrics/notes on them) and I’m glad he didn’t. All the things people have around their space are representations of who they are and every piece of it adds to the story. To remove it is to remove the person. Maybe not quite as drastic but it’s tantamount to the same thing.

What was I talking about? Ahhh… lighting.

So… the octabox was at camera right, nestled on a stack of wood to be processed into decks. There’s a bare light in the middle ground that’s bringing up the back and a light further back from that pointed almost at the camera to shed more light on the background. Without these two lights anything beyond the guys was just pitch black.

It’s another unwritten rule that I learned from wedding photography that if someone speaks, they need a photo. The article was written by Jason, and he’s quite an important part of the story so, he needs a photo. We already did the badass photo of the team with a lot of lighting, and some processing to make it look gritty. For the shots of Jason I wanted something quieter, lighter, yet still good enough and functional enough to be in a magazine. This is basically the office- it’s a desk in a little alcove off the shop floor- and for the lighting I needed help from a Voice Activated Light Stand named Ira. It’s a simple setup you’ve seen a million times- one big soft light overhead. That was it. I think I asked Jason to tilt his head back a little bit so there wouldn’t be big evil shadows under his eyes but that’s pretty much it. You don’t need to do everything with a 6 light setup and a fog machine and when it comes to lighting- if it works, it works.

And a similar shot, but a different orientation:

The ‘wheel’ shot was for some levity in what is essentially a piece on industrial manufacturing, albeit for an uncommon purpose and provides some color and some candor. Skateboarding is an industry that can never be accused of taking itself too seriously and I figured this would be a cool shot to provide a great splash of color and also get a headshot that is relevant to the story and to Comet.

And another one. Straight up headshot yo.

This is a shot I’ve been wanting to get for a long time and finding somewhere with the space and facility to make it happen was a nice bonus. Like I was saying before about the stuff around a scene being relevant- it’s the same here except whereas before the stuff was pretty small/hidden in this shot I wanted the stuff to be an equal part in the subject matter of the shot. I set up the lights, climbed a ladder, asked Jason to stand there and look up at me.  Upon first glance the lighting isn’t super-obvious, which is how I like it, but when you inspect it you can see what’s going on – there’s a light in the back under the egress at the back, there’s a light at camera right to provide fill in that area (and for Jason) and the key light is at camera left. Easy. Then it’s just a matter of dialing in the camera settings.

This is Lorren, Comet’s production manager and a very very good woodworker in his own right (google LL Hammond). This is kind of like a shot you’d see in Wired Magazine. Just a big soft light doing all the work and the light in the back was kept in because essentially it looks cool giving the scene an industrious style that wasn’t there when it was removed. I’m a big fan of the lines in these 2 shots, how Lorren’s (awesome) posture mirrors the lines of the cabinet and how the colors complement each other. Tis nice.

Next up, we have Ira, who is an amazing lighting assistant and also a black-belt CNC guy. For this series of shots I hid a light as far back as the space would allow and it ended up behind the CNC machine itself, so I raised it to about 8 ft and pointed it slightly down. It’s far to allow for a decent spread  (so I don’t have to move it very often) and more importantly, to keep it and the cable out of the way of the shop floor. Ira was gracious enough to stand still for a few seconds while I got a full body shot to go alongside the shots of the manufacturing being carried out.

So, as you’ve noticed, a lot of these shots use a similar (if not identical) setup, but like I mentioned before: if it works, it works and I was mindful that this story is as much about the manufacturing process as it is about the people doing the processing.

There are shots I didn’t want to (or need to) pose or complicate because at the end of the day, these guys are at work and this factory is in full swing so the quicker I get done, the less time I’m in the way, this is why the lighting setups are predominantly simple and easily mobile. The exceptions being when either everyone was involved, or everyone was on lunch

I got word that the magazine is out mid-June something and I’ll post a pic of it here when I see it but in the meantime, I hope this was of use to some of you and thanks to the Comet guys for being cool.

As always, any questions, comments, etc send me an email at info@tezmphoto.com.

Cheers!

Howdy hi,

Like I said at the end of the last post- this time I’m gonna be talking about a model shoot I did recently. This model was awesome – a lot of fun to work with, easy to talk to and willing to take a chance and anyone that can sit in pigeon crap for 30 minutes is ok in my book.

If you’re my friend on Facebook, or follow my group thingy on there you’ve probably seen one of the shots from this shoot already. It was a shot I’ll get to in a minute that used a wonderfully simple lighting style, but done well.

When I was scouting locations for this shoot, I was looking for somewhere with a lot of texture in the environment, sheltered (so I could use my lights without worrying about ambient contamination), and available. I found this place under a parking garage on my travels through Ithaca when I first arrived and was checking out the downtown area. It ain’t much to look at upon first glance but it fit the bill perfectly. So if you’re a photographer looking for a location to use – get off your ass and go for a walk. Don’t drive. Walk around, go down that alley and turn that corner, you might just find what you’ve been looking for all along.

I think during this entire shoot I only used one light. Whilst not a conscious decision to go the minimalist route I didn’t need anything more for what I was going for and there’s something about Sam’s look and her face that really compliments it.

We had a little help from the wind on this one and kudos to Sam for holding the pose for about a minute while we were waiting for the wind to cooperate. There’s nothing really fancy about this shot, it’s pretty simple in terms of just about everything – there’s an octabox off to the left and pointing a bit down. I’ve got some shots that were taken before this one when I was concerned with the lines being straight, but they were too straight it made the picture boring so I tilted the camera to make the lines in the frame match the lines of Sam’s arms, which gives it a bit of motion and makes things a lot more interesting than just having straight lines everywhere. The crap on the floor is a nice addition, and actually why I chose this corner. When I’m looking around a frame I’m looking to see if every bit of it is doing something, so no space is wasted. I know some guys clean up the place and remove all the objects out of the frame that they think are distracting. That’s cool, but in this particular instance I wanted all the crap occupying space so that as your eye flows around the shot there’s something to look at. If you see this shot bigger you’ll get a nice surprise from the coffee cup. this is a 200% crop:

It seemed funny at the time.

Anyway…

these shots aren’t chronological btw, this is from the second location inside another parking garage that I saw, and loved immediately because it basically looked like hell and is one of those places where every 90 degree turn yields a different background and different props to use if you so desire. I asked Sam to make herself angular, almost awkward looking for these shots, not for any reason beyond it looking cool- and hey, that’s what this is all about right? I have friends who analyze every shot to the Nth degree and wonder why every leaf is the way it is… angles just look cool.

I lit this with a turkey dish to the right hand side. The TD is becoming a fave of mine – it’s kinda hard, kinda soft and makes fantastic shadows. And depending on how far/close you are from the subject you can basically dial in the amount of vignetting you want in the shot (the closer the light is the more of a vignette you’ll get as the spread of light will be narrower).

About that whole vignette thing – the TD (or beauty dish as it should be called) is great for full length shots. Here I have the light positioned at Sam’s face. Since the eye is pulled towards the brightest part of an image, it makes sense to make the focal point the brightest point and everything else gradually darker. By angling the light to where the focal point is, you can save yourself work later on in editing.

Every photo shoot needs a pile of crap to sit on.

I doubt this one will make it into my portfolio because it’s very similar to one of the previous shots, but I wanted to experiment with color toning to give images a different feel. This look works better on lighter images but I thought this shot had a quasi-catalog look about it, so hey, here it is.

Shot this at f/2.5 for some nice blurry action… which you can’t see on an 800 pixel photo, but trust me, it’s there.

Attitude. Lots and lots of attitude.

So after all that it leads me to the final shot, and probably one of my favorite shots I’ve taken in a long time, or at least one of my favorite shots from a model shoot.

We did a number of shots here with the same lighting scheme and similar poses but they weren’t ‘right’ and I had that feeling that we were close to something really cool but something wasn’t working as it should. The shawl makes this shot. I took the fabric and basically threw it at Sam so it draped across the bottom half of the shot and like it was coming closer to the camera. I shot this at 24mm with the lens practically on the fabric.

I wanted the shawl to look big and looming or creeping, like it was alive and coming out of the frame. Or something.

At the start of this post I mentioned the lighting style was oh so simple, but sometimes (a lot of the time) you don’t need anything beyond that. I could talk a great deal about the lighting and what went where, but this photo does the same thing a lot quicker:

So, Shane, I hope that answers your questions But as much notice as the lighting gets, it’s nothing without decent communication between the people involved on a shoot. If the model isn’t comfortable, you’ll get crappy photos and if the photographer isn’t confident (and competent), you’ll get crappy photos.

And there we have it. Fun was had, turkey dishes were used. Another shoot done.

big love,

tez

www.tezmphoto.com

info@tezmphoto.com

Howdy,

A couple of weeks ago I was lighting a movie- a moody, brooding piece about violence, abuse, dependence and desire. A 3 day shoot which will become a 15 minute short film, brought to you by the creative vision of the World’s Angriest Vegan, V. Fiamma. I just pointed lights at things/people and moved some plants around (to amazing dramatic effect!). Once the video is edited and good to go, I’ll post it here if I can, or link to it.

This was an interesting experience. There’s a lot of sitting around on movie sets, or at least for my part of the movie- I set up some lights, run it through, check the angles, check the scene, adjust if necessary, then stay silent when the actual takes begin. But for all that, it’s something I’m happy and proud to have been a part of since movie lighting is a big influence on my style and look in general (watch anything by Benecio Del Toro to see the best lighting there is).

When the camera wasn’t rolling I had a lot of opportunity to obtain the production stills aka photos of a movie being made and of people doing stuff. I was traveling/shooting light for this. I wanted something quick, easy, reliable and small that I could have with me on a busy set. To match these criteria I used a 50mm 1.4 and nothing else, ISO set to 3200 and shooting around f/2, then try to get the shot.

It’s a funny thing about this documentary style of photography. All the rules go out the window. You don’t worry about rule of thirds, plants coming out of heads, overexposure or whatever else because it’s all secondary. Of course I think I think about it subconsciously (so is that thinking?) but still, when I was looking through the shots I was more concerned with capturing the moment and expressions/activity rather than making something to hang on my wall… yet by looking at these photos it’s their complete lack of adhesion to any rules that (to me) makes them work, and at the end of the day, emotion and activity speak for themselves.

Or something.

So sit back and watch a movie being made. I’ll butt in periodically with exciting anecdotes.

Lighting test 1 feat. W.A.V.

Interesting fact: this is the director/writer/producer of the movie. He wore a different band shirt every day of the shoot. This was a shot for the first lighting setup featuring something I’d pretty happy about: the plant. the director wanted something to break up the ‘flatness’ of the wall in the background, I saw a plant, moved it, stuck a light behind it and viola a cookie to give some dimension to the background and to break up the lines in the shot. It looks cool on film and has the appearance of tendrils reaching down… but to what? Redemption? Salvation? Beer?

Adam

Black wrap over windows is used to block out the sun (if you have enough of it).

boom!

That’s a dolly. Hi-tech movie magic at it’s best right here.

16:9

DIRECTING

Improvised clappers

Looks like I shot it.

Waiting for the cue

And there we have it!

This was a blast. At the time it was pretty hard-going; the days are long, shoots are repetitive, nerves fray and nothing ever goes 100% to plan, but isn’t that what makes it interesting?

Next time, I’ll tell you all about a fashion shoot with an aspiring model. Lots of gloom.

until next time,

tez

info@tezmphoto.com

www.tezmphoto.com

Well hello again, I mentioned last time that I’d be doing some work for the State Theatre here in Ithaca. That work is now done, I’ll be delivering the pics tomorrow to the head honcho and all around good dude, Doug Levine.

The State recently underwent a huge spate of renovations to replace some damaged/crumbling plaster work, change some lightbulbs and basically bring the place back up to its high standards. I went in there before the renovations and it was impressive then and now the renovations have been (almost) completed it’s rather spectacular. The gold gilding now gleams, the carpets are lush and it’s just a cool place with an air of opulence and grandeur about it and it makes me want to wear a tuxedo and quaff cognac with stockbrokers. Alas I wore jeans and a sweater but that’s how I roll. I  don’t have a tuxedo. My wife gets mad every time I wear shirts as I have a habit to roll up the sleeves.

Bryan Adams was playing on that stage about a month ago.

For this shoot I took my 17-40mm, that was in the bag with a 50mm and an 85mm just in case I wanted to pick out any details around the interior that 40mm was too short for. I shot most of these at around f/13-18 and around ISO 160 and I was frequently at 30 second shutter speeds since it’s pretty dark in this place. The cool thing about shooting at small apertures and long speeds is the ’sunstars’ you get from lights- when the aperture blades at the back of a lens cause the light to turn from a circle into a multi-pointed star.

Pro tip = the more aperture blades your lens has, the more points on the star. More = better! If you’re exceptionally nerdy you can ascertain what lens someone shot a scene with by counting the number of points on a star. This is something I never do. Never.

You see that quirky seat in the middle? That seat belongs to a long-time donor to the State. The donor’s name is on a plaque on the arm. That’s pretty gangster. That means she had a front row seat to Bryan Adams when he was here about 6 weeks ago. Interestingly, this shot was a bitch to get, which it wouldn’t have been if I had prepared before time, but alas, I got to use my famous McGuyvering skills to make badassery happen. So, at either side of the stage are large, white floodlights since hey, it’s a stage, you gotta light that stuff. No matter which way I pointed the camera I was getting flare and mist as the light was raking across the lens. I didn’t want this. With a hood, this wouldn’t be an issue – you screw on the hood, you’re good to go. I had no hood So, for the 30 second exposure I had to hold 2 note pads that were lying around backstage to block the light from hitting the lens. When you’re shooting at 17mm this is a pain in the ass as you basically have to hold them arms length apart and kind of in front of the lens, all the time looking at the camera to see when the shadows from the notepad are in the right place… then hold them there for 30 seconds without moving. It’s a lot of fun. Alternatively, you could just buy a hood… but where’s the fun?

That big light on the left is what I’m talking about. I had to beef up the contrast in post to make it look like it should. No big deal since contrast is the easiest thing to change. When I shoot, I set the camera to the lowest possible contrast (most of the time) to ensure I get the maximum dynamic range I can. You can tune it later by moving a dial in post, but if you overexpose or lose detail in the shadows, you’re making more work for yourself and in a place like this with deep shadows and big hard spotlights, there’s a lot of contrast in the scene to negotiate.

Those two shots were from the stage, 17mm, f/16.

You see those gold markings on the ceiling? They’re actually representations of star constellations.

I realize that all these shots are of the same things. Here’s something different:

This is the main lobby and it’s honestly breathtaking, it’s almost like an old cathedral. It’d be a great place for a wedding actually. I wanted to get the sweeping staircase in the shot and the chandelier at the top so I ended up shooting this pretty low and angling the lens way up. The stairs are the leading line into the photo… or the banisters are at the sides and the arch at the top caps it off. It’s a pleasing image, kind of gothic looking and would make an awesome movie set. For this to look ‘right’ though I had to move around a bunch of stuff. There was a vacuum cleaner next to the stairs, some trash cans on the right and a sign on the left that said “please be quiet in the lobby” or words to that effect. I debated removing the fire extinguisher too but decided against it since in itself that’s probably a violation of about 500 regulations. With the vacuum cleaner and trash cans this shot loses about 86% of it’s appeal and almost looks satirical or juxtaposed. You know when you look at something and you think “hmmm… something isn’t right”? That’s what happened here. Luckily I knew what to do to make it ‘right’

I set the white balance manually to 3700K in here. The lights were at 3200K but everything looked so cold and white that it made the whole place look sterile and uninviting, and even though to be technically ‘correct’ I should be at 3200k I wanted some warmth in there to make the place look nicer, more lived in and also to compliment the reds and golds of the surrounds. Warmth is good sometimes. That shot above will make an awesome print too.

Seats. You sit in them.

Thing is, I knew that some of these photos would be (hopefully) used inside a brochure/leaflet or a program or something similar so I wanted to get some atmosphere shots with a repeated background or something so when copy gets placed on top of the shot it isn’t cutting off something important in the frame… that’s actually a horrible explanation. What I mean is that in the shots so far, if you wrote something on them you’d be cutting off or hiding some of the detail in a part of the frame so I needed some shots that would still set the scene but be usable for copy placement. For this you need something that the scene has a lot of – be it grass, columns, trees or in this case: seats.

See? Now the designers can write whatever they like and the image will still hold its integrity because it’s just made up of a single element – red seats. this was at 50mm, f/2.5 I think. 85mm squished things too much and 50mm is generally great for just about everything… as you’ll see in my next post which will be all about shooting on the set of a real-life, no-foolin’ movie (wooooo) and everything that entails.

And just for some variety:

Same as before: 50mm, f/2.5. Blah blah blah.

So, when I shoot buildings/architecture I generally do it in 2 phases – once with a wide lens and tripod and go around taking the wide, all-encompassing shots and then again with a 50mm or longer to pick out details and do the blurry/artsy stuff. It’s a different perspective on the same things as depth of field and focal length can influence your shooting and somethings work at 85mm that don’t work at 17mm.

For this shot I put the camera on the ground pointing up and took the shot. I wanted to see what it would look like and it turned out rather nice.

Chandelier. Curtains. Arches. Job done.

At this point I was pretty much done. I’d got the shots I wanted to get but figured I could now play around and try something else that I know hasn’t been done before in this place and something I don’t normally do… some semblance of a grand finale. I present the State Theatre:

this is a 6ft image. There’s a bigger version on my website that looks pretty damned awesome. I shot this at 17mm on a tripod, f/14, manual white balance and turned the camera maybe 35 degrees with each shot to overlap the edges of the image into a panorama. It’s something different in what could be seen as a mundane project/shoot, but I’ve always said that boring images come from boring photographers.

For a shot like this it’s important to keep the variables the same, especially white balance, otherwise all the frames come out different colors/shades so if you leave your stuff at auto and cross your fingers, it’s time to switch it to manual. Even if you need to change it later, you can edit the image as a whole instead of trying to change the color of 1/4 of an image to match the other 3/4. That would be a real pain in the ass, so, save yourself some work and eliminate whatever variables you can.

I’m pretty proud of the last shot. The State has been shot to death by any number of photographers, both professional and otherwise and I’ve never seen anybody busting out a panorama. You saw it here first, folks.

And that’s about it! This was a 2 hour shoot and I have to thank Doug for letting me do whatever I wanted and trusting me to represent such an important building in my own way.

As I mentioned briefly in this post, the next one will be about shooting on the set of a movie. In the biz they’re called ‘production stills’ and I should have that up in about a week’s time. It’s an entirely different mindset to shooting something like this, and is more akin to shooting sports or a wedding when you have a split second to make a decision on shooting parameters. Much fun was had.

So, until next time folks, thanks for reading/looking and as always, any questions to info@tezmphoto.com – I had to remove the comments due to 99% of them being related to dick pills.

See you then,

tez

www.tezmphoto.com

TC3= Tompkins Cortland Community College. It’s a mouthful, so we’ll stick with TC3.

The commission for this job came about because TC3 were looking for a new direction for their ad campaign. They were looking for something different from the usual college stuff of ’subject stood against a white background holding a book’ and wanted pics of real students and graduates maybe done a little differently, with a bit more ‘edge’ and something maybe more appealing to the youth market. The first shoot was in downtown Ithaca, at a place called The Bandwagon, which is a microbrewery and restaurant in a location in a hollowed out mountain surrounded by a lake of lava. They make some pretty interesting beer too like chocolate and peanut butter stout and 8% IPAs and other fun things. I got to sample them too. Fringe benefits right there.

So, first things first: have a look around. They wanted to show off the skills the subjects had learned whilst they were at TC3, which I think were biochemistry and business management style qualifications, which if you’re running a brewery are pretty handy things to know. They brew all the beer on location, so I figured it would be cool to have the brewing stuff in the frame somewhere. The brewing room is a small space, 7 ft ceilings, and not much ground space (it’s taken up by the equipment) to position lights or people.

That’s what it looks like! I wasn’t so sure about the light in the ceiling but I sort of like the look it gives, somewhat industrial. Oh, I advised the guys not to wear black or white… which got reinterpreted by one of the guys as “don’t wear stripes” which is also a good suggestion. I say black or white because white just reflects and black just absorbs and not much detail shows up in print in shots of these two colors.

This shot was lit with a big ass octabox to the right, a light from the left and my secret weapon during this shoot – a light hidden behind the table/rack/desk/contraption with the barrels on it pointed at the wall behind Mike. This light was gridded with a 20 degree grid to narrow the beam into a small circle. The reasons for the back light were numerous, but mainly, it’s a kickass bare brick wall in this old basement and it’s a nice, complimentary/contrasting texture to the smoothness of his shirt and the metal. Also, the light adds depth and creates a planar distinction between foreground and background. It’s all about the planar distinction, which is a phrase I just coined and will be using mucho in the future. I think it’s one of those words or phrases you can fit into a sentence and people will smile and nod then say “yes… I agree”, like saying the word cromulent .

I shot this at f/10 at 35mm with a 24-70 2.8. I wanted sufficient depth of field to pick up all the details of the scene. Since I was shooting at ISO 200 I had the main light at something like 3/4 power… but that might be a lie.

I asked Mike to “look inquisitive” for this one. This is 10/10 inquisitiveness right here.

Figuring that this is kind of like the laboratory of beer for these guys, I wanted to represent the brewing process and the checking/analyzing of the products and get a bit of a sciencey vibe going on. I asked Mike to hold it up like he was checking it out for impurities. This isn’t a composite by the way, just badass lighting and planar distinction in the highest order. Again, main light was an octabox to the left, there was a rim/fill light to the right (the light that was lighting the background in the previous pic) and the first few shots looked a bit well… lame. So, thing is, people’s eyes are drawn to the brightest point of an image, be whatever it is. This is why backgrounds are sometimes distracting because there’s usually something bright pulling your eye away from what you’re meant to be looking at. I figured that hey, people are meant to be looking at Mike, and the beer, sooooo what do we do?

I put a light in the back, way in the back, right next to the door thus creating a fire hazard. This light was bare – no reflector or anything else to spread the light as much as I could. I pointed it straight up at the ceiling, went back to my position in front of Mike and had him position the glass until it was right in front of the brightest point on the ceiling so it looks like the beer has a corona (see what I did there?) around it. I had to photoshop the beer itself to remove reflections of the lights and add some of the colour back into it but honestly, the back light made all the difference. It pulls your eye, but it’s subtle , it’s not like “hey look, this is lit! There’s a light down there!” and it looks a lot more complicated than it really is… but I do pride myself on my McGuyver ability on photo shoots – more on that later.

You might also notice a brightening in the background behind Mike’s head – this was done in PS with a masked out curves layer. Nothing fancy. I’m rather proud of how this shot came out actually.

Say hello to Al, the remaining 50% of the Bandwagon brains… or looks… or brawn… something. He’s a badass anyway, and wore black, but not stripes. This shot was basic as they come. Big octabox held by my beautiful assistant-for-the-day at a slightly overhead angle. The light in the background was left from Mike’s shot above. We’re getting chronological here. Shot with an 85mm lens… nothing particularly fancy going on, just a solid shot of a guy stood around looking pretty dashing. Mike commented, saying it looked like a catalog shot. I’m not sure if that was a compliment but I took it as such.

This shot is all about the details. This is the Bandwagon, with seats loving upholstered by Mike and his lady (www.oneswellgal.com) in a great rich deep red. The main light here was via an octabox to the left which covered Al, the sofa and a bit of the wall further into the frame. basically, this shot is 3 segments that need to be taken care of individually. You can break this shot down into the front, middle and back, or Al, coats, and girl. The lighting on Al, we’ve covered.

For the middle of the frame I wanted something to light the wall between the front and back to give some depth and stitch everything in the frame together so the eye has a logical path to follow through the pic. I did this by asking for a roll of tin foil, putting a light behind the bar pointed at the wall with a reflector over it and fashioning a snoot from the tin foil. Tin foil works awesome because you can crimp it for a smaller beam with less spread or open it up to cover a wider area – you can also poke holes in it too which is cool for adding texture to back lighting. So, I had to play around getting the beam spread right so it lit up the wall but didn’t light up the bar (which is copper and super super reflective), then lowering the power to light the wall and coats but not overpower the main light on Al, I think it was at something like 1/4 power.

Lastly, we have the girl at the end eating cake. I wanted this part of the frame lit kinda brightly to make it look inviting and also to make it look like the Bandwagon was in full swing (it was closed during the shoot). I hid a light in an umbrella the best I could behind the door and angled it down at the table, set the power to around 1/2 and fired a test shot. Looking good! Neither front or back is distracting and each sits well in their own part of the frame. There was a bit of thinking involved with this shot, and I ended up lighting it by simplifying the shot into the 3 segments, lighting each one independently, then all together. Bam. Job done. You might see these shots around NY on buses and billboards, depending on what the lovely people at TC3 decide to choose.

About 2 weeks after this shoot we did the second part of the campaign – shots of students studying things. This was a fun day involving a lot of running around, a lot of changes of surrounding/location, and a lot of thinking on your feet as we’d have maybe 20 minutes in a location with someone who’d been waiting for a while so I would come in, say howdy, then think about how to do something cool in the space we had. First up, we’re in the middle of a cafe in a very busy college, lots of people are around the place drinking coffee and looking at us. The subject here is a screenwriter with a frankly awesome beard.

It’s nothing fancy. It doesn’t need to be. It needs to have space for copy however and show sufficient activity in the background so people get the idea that this guy is studying, absorbed in his work and comfortable in the luscious surroundings of TC3, which is a bustling, happening place. That wasn’t the brief by the way.

Just one light here folks – big octabox to the right. I had an interesting discussion with the subject here about movies. I’m pretty interested in the craft and science of writing a script. If you’ve tried it, it’s seriously hard to keep it interesting for 100 pages… like keeping a blog entry interesting for more than 200 words. Anyway, it’s a basic shot… nothing particularly edgy or dramatic about it, but it works.

A special mention goes out to this guy. He’s awesome. In the kitchen, I shot 3 people who were aspiring restaurant management/chef people. After I was done with the first subject I asked if this guy could come and take his turn. He walks up, stands like a pro, smiles and nails it. What a guy. There was some McGuyver action going on in this photo. The main light was an octabox held overhead. There was also a light in the background to light the back, hence the cool shadows thrown on the tile. The McGuyvering came from a flat cookie sheet that I had a passer-by hold  at about waist height angled perfectly horizontally. The theory was that the light from the octabox above would reflect on the silver cookie dish and provide some fill light back on the subject, alleviating the shadows beneath the chin and eyes. And hey, it worked!

TC3 has a badass softball team – they’re something like champions of the universe for 600 years running or something equally dramatic. The girls were great. For this shot, I wanted a space for the college to write some copy if need be, hence the space to the right of the frame.

No copy space in this one.

This was lit pretty much the same as lit the GPW shots from yesteryear – big soft light as the main, small hard light to provide some separation. In this shoot we had help from the sun… we did this at around 3 pm so the sun was pretty high and pretty strong since it was the end of winter, and the winter sun is well… high and strong at around 3pm. The main light was at full power to overcome the sun and I think this turned out well, definitely different from what the other colleges in the area are putting out as their ad material and something a bit more vivid, a bit bolder, a little less ’safe’ and down a different path which is what this shoot was meant to be from the start.

Jeez, 2007 words.

As per usual, all shots with a 5d2, lit on location with a Vagabond thing and some Alien Bees lights. I knew I’d be shooting in a mixed bag of locations and wouldn’t be doing any long-range or sports photography so I just packed a 24-70, 50mm and an 85mm in the bag which covers most eventualities.  The softball shots were shot at 85mm actually. I like the compression it gives and I wanted the cage to be pretty prominent in the photos. If i’d shot wider the cage would have seemed really small and far away and not big or close like it is here. It’s all about perspective.

Actually, the whole focal length thing is something I’ve begun to appreciate ever since reading Ansel Adam’s book (I don’t remember which one) a few years ago and I saw he took a lot of his landscape shots at like 300mm or longer. This confused me, I figured landscapes had to be shot wide because hey, it’s a landscape. So I tried it for myself  and started shooting landscapes at 200mm and then shooting wide with a 17mm or something and seeing the differences between them. This is rudimentary and I urge you to practice shooting landscapes with a long lens – it really gives you an extra dimension to work with when you’re thinking about a shot as you can choose how prominent the background is.

I’m going off topic here, but here are shots of the same thing, at different focal lengths to show what I’m talking about:

17mm

Same waterfall - 50mm

The falls look a lot closer in the 50mm shot, making them look a lot bigger. Like I said, this is a fundamental thing in photography and something you need to consider on shoots. Before I was doing it instinctively, now I know why shots looked weird, or looked great in the past.

Cool eh?

And that’s me done.

Next time, I’m gonna talk about architecture stuff as I have a shoot tomorrow at the State Theater taking pics of their interior after the renovations they just finished. Should be interesting.

And remember: planar distinction is where it’s at.

Oh, to submit comments you have to log in – I was getting too many offers for dick pills (one offer is too many) spamming up my stuff so I had to make it harder for real people to comment. If you want to ask me anything about what you read/looked at here send me something to info@tezmphoto.com.

Much love to you,

tez

Yeah… it’s been a long time.

I moved from Montana to Ithaca, NY. It’s a nice place. The humidity is a very welcome change!

Since I’ve been here I did a job for a well-known college, met a bunch of cool people, met a photographer who threatens to slash your tires, and am shooting a few other bits and bobs.

One of the things I do, and I dunno, maybe you’ll get something out of it too, but whenever I go or move to a new area, or if I’m staying somewhere I take the time to walk around for a few hours with a camera and a 50mm lens and see what I can see. This not only familiarizes you with street names and landmarks, but it also trains your eye and lets you scope out cool locations should you ever need them. I suggest walking because it makes sense: if you wanna stop, you can stop. If you wanna look behind something, you can look behind it. That’s hard to do in a car. Usually I just take a 50mm- reason being that it’s the closest focal length available to what the eye naturally sees (I think the eye is 48mm but whatever) so if you see something cool, you point the camera and boom, there you are. Also, using a prime stops me from getting lazy. You have to move to frame not just sit on a bench and rotate a zoom ring, which is all fine and well but if you’re feeling rusty or stuck, use a prime and take nothing else.

That’s down a back alley somewhere downtown. I liked this window. It’s funny, people who have lived here all their lives look at this photo and say “where is that?” I tell them it’s around the corner and they go and check it out for themselves. You can see a lot by looking up once in a while.

Happy Accident

teeth

Setting ISO to Auto comes in incredibly handy during times like this too. It sets the ISO accordingly to give you a shutter speed similar to your focal length (so 50mm = 1/50, 100mm = 1/100 and so forth). Of course, you can set it and forget it, but if you’re walking in between sunlit streets and gloomy alleys and rapidly changing conditions it’s one less thing to worry about. Cool thing about the 5d2 is that up to ISO 3200, there’s nothing to worry about in terms of noise, and if there is, then overexpose a little bit and bring it back in lightroom/photoshop. Noise lives in shadows, so get rid of the shadows, get rid of noise (theoretically). These shots were taken in between ISO 100 and ISO 2000.

This is an overpass between two buildings, it wasn’t taken upside down or flipped or anything. Again, I liked the windows. Like old arrow slits. Or something.

And hey, look, it’s an alleyway. If you want some clothes hanging rod things, you can pick them up here!

There’s stuff everywhere if you look for it. Just walk around, explore. You might  just find something cool you can use in the future.

Next time, I’ll be showing some stuff I did for the college here. It was an interesting shoot  that place in the back room of a microbrewery here (and a good one too). Best part was sampling beers. For science of course.

much love,

tez

I had a dream last night where Dana Carvey told me I needed to write more. He enjoyed reading my blog apparently and was upset that I hadn’t given it more attention. I said he was right and promised him I’d get right on it.

That came around because I saw a Dana Carvey DVD of standup comedy or something similar so hey, if you see his DVD he visits you in your dreams. Oh, Carvey is Garth from Waynes World by the way, and no, he wasn’t dressed like Garth.

Since the last time I wrote on this blog I’ve done a hell of a lot. Most notably, I moved from Montana (where I was for a year and a half) all the way across the nation to New York state- Ithaca specifically. The contrast between 2 stepping and Stetsons and dreadlocks, cloth diapers and public breastfeeding is dramatic and honestly welcomed. A lot of people tout diversity as one of this country’s greatest virtues but is a virtue that hasn’t quite dispersed to every corner yet, which might be why people convinced themselves I was Australian even after my numerous protests (and evidence) to the contrary.

But hey, that’s all by the by. Suffice to say that I’m now in CNY and so far it’s going good. It’s been 2 weeks and some work is lined up, we have an apartment lined up too and I’m drinking peach tea infused with yerba mate. It’s pretty good actually, tastes like a neem leaf for the first few sips then mellows out.

Wait… this is a photo blog.

Since I last wrote here I carried out many many shoots with a diverse range of clients and subjects, from a SWAT team, to an aspiring actor/model, to an artist with a penchant for knives and wedding cakes. So if you thought I hadn’t done anything since I last updated, how wrong you were. Not that I can blame you for thinking that but moving across country and organizing everything that entails is a rather large task that leaves little room for writing a blog.

I also did a shoot with a Roller Derby team and another with a good friend of mine and guitar-hero, Parker Brown.

I’ve seen Parker play a ton of times, he plays a ton of instruments with about 786 different bands/groups. He’s a good dude and plays a mean guitar. Parker’s also one of the few people to play a Jazzmaster which is a shame since they’re pretty badass.

The Parker shoot was for a magazine article on the man himself highlighting his multi-instrumentalism and his tenacity for playing in a scene that is by no means huge with very few roads out of it. His last CD, Of love in a foreign land released by Known By Name (plug: the artwork was designed by me), is great. His playing is great. Ryan Kabeary is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. I wish I knew of somewhere you could pick it up online and give it a listen because whatever you’re listening to now, it’s probably not as good… unless you’re listening to Clearing the Channel by Sinch, in which case I will buy you a beer.

The shoot with the actor person was great fun. The subject is one of those people who can pull off every look under the sun- they can look like a badass when they dress down, look like a lawyer when they dress up and can pull off any look you’re going for.  I hope he succeeds with the acting stuff. Interestingly enough, when I was editing the photos in Starbucks (this isn’t the usual, but it works) someone mentioned he looked like an undercover cop on a TV show so something must be going right.

Shooting a SWAT team was an interesting experience. It felt like I was on a movie set watching the actors/stuntmen throw grenades and shout “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” and then ham it up in all their tactical gear, guns, masks, radios and the (very heavy) vests they wear. I can’t thank those guys enough for their generosity and openness with answering all my questions about practically everything and indeed for allowing me to come in to their space during their training and get them to pose for me- all because I had the idea of doing a shoot with some law enforcement personnel and a friend of mine said “I could speak to the SWAT team if you’d like?”. Hell yes. I guess sometimes when you roll the dice, your number comes up and you get lucky. So to all the guys: Thank you very much for doing the job you do and I had a blast.

ba dum tschs.

So… what else… oh yeah, the Roller Derby. That was interesting. Hunting for power outlets and attempting to convince 14 people to line up in a photogenic formation is always on the top of my list for a fun evening’s entertainment.  This was, again, for a magazine article that was exploring the scene as well as the individuals that make up the scene. It’s a human interest story, just like all the best stories are because without the human element most people simply don’t give a shit. There’s nothing to connect to. The journalist did an awesome job with the writing of the story too. Humorous, tender, with interwoven strands of friendship, betrayal and vengeance. Possibly.

There’s a store across the street here called House of Shalimar, which is next to a shop selling hemp clothing. This is a fun town. Very accepting of alterna-cultures, contra-cultures, sub-cultures and grasped the bohemian ethic of live and let live a long time ago and its grip has not been relinquished. Bryan Adams was here last night, I saw his tourbus outside a guitar store here that sells vintage and rare instruments (1958 Les Paul anyone?). Oh, I learned that Ithaca has its own currency, the Ithaca Dollar, for some reason. A hippie enclave with its own currency. Wonderful.

I spent a bit of time redoing some old pics too like this one of Holly that I always felt had untapped potential which I have only just now realized.

And this one from Glacier National Park which I rather like:

And there we have it. Carvey is appeased.

My website is still the same: www.tezmphoto.com, my email is the same: info@tezmphoto.com and I’m still doing 100% badass photography, just in a different town.

Until next time folks.

tez

Firstly, before I go any further (which I suppose is already implied) I would like to thank Terrill, Will, Jennifer and all the guys at Fusion who put up with me pestering them, some of the people I asked couldn’t even stand up as they had literally stepped out of the ring, took 20 steps, and I was there with a big light and a smile saying “hi there, remember when I told you I’d be waiting for you?” So, thanks guys, this couldn’t have happened without your help.

That sounds melodramatic but it’s absolutely true. I had a plan in mind that absolutely 100% needed the cooperation of the fighters at this MMA event and i couldn’t have winged this or got by without it. All this talk and I haven’t even said anything about what I actually did.

If you’ve seen my work on my website, you may have noticed I have a bit of a thing for representing time, so I’ll take a series of pictures during an event, like two shots of the same person in the same orientation and then put them next to one another- I do this because I like to show their natural reactions to things. On my website there’s a shot of Jacky from a tea shop around here, one shot is of her sitting and smiling, the next is when she’s doing a half smile but she’s looking away and distracted (the other girl who works in the shop came in to ask something). I did a series of shots of a banana in various stages of consumption to represent it actually being eaten which was a formulaic attempt at an idea, or a notion I’ve had for a long time and with photography it’s so hard to represent the passing of time in a single frame, so if you have more than one frame it becomes easier.

The plan with the MMA was to get before and after shots of the fighters, so a shot before they went in the ring, and a shot afterward. Put these shots next to each other and badabing, we have something that represents an event occurring or something like that. I was hesitant to write about this since somebody better than me will take my idea, make a book, and make millions… unless I contact Dana White first… say, there’s an idea.

This sounds like an easy thing to do but it’s actually pretty difficult- not to get the actual shots, that’s just pushing a button, but being all over the place at once. I was shooting the matches, shooting the guys backstage after the fights, trying to round up more guys to get in on my idea and then reminding the guys I had spoken to that I’d be backstage after their fight so please don’t wander off, from a photographic point of view it meant I had to change hats pretty damn quick as there was a 15 second interval between shooting sports through a cage in a dim arena to shooting a punch-drunk subject in a studio setting.

Fun times.

victory

You have to wait for the good stuff.

I didn’t want to use a flash here. I learned that a long time ago when I shooting GPW matches (I learned everything there). A flash had a two-fold negative effect: one, it makes an ugly shadow on the wall/ceiling and two, it’s pretty damned distracting to the people in the ring if you’re there firing a flash every 3 seconds which isn’t something you want when they’re fighting in a ring or a cage, but could come in handy if you’re being attacked as a way to blind the attacker. Plus, flashes have a great way of killing the atmosphere. Sure, you can dial it down but then you have WB issues, and sure, you can gel but…  I just don’t like them, there we go.

I don’t like shooting from those weird podium things on the posts. There was one reserved for me to stand on so I could see over the cage and shoot without the bars being in the way but I really didn’t like it, not for any reasons of height or precarious positioning, but because if you look down on people then take their picture it doesn’t make them look dramatic, or big, or powerful whereas if you look up at them it does all of those things. Look at the difference between those two pics. The one shot from below holds much more power, even though the top shot is pretty cool.

You’ll see the top guy later on looking pretty mean.

This is what I mean- get low, get close, it’s where the good stuff is. This guy’s being hit right in the head, and yeah it’s blurry, and yeah, it’s into the light but it doesn’t matter, it works. I think it works because there’s a face in it, which reminds me of a quote I read from a sports shooter who said the key to successful sports photography was “2 faces and a ball”.

You’ve probably noticed a lot of these shots are of guys either on the ground, or being positioned to put them on the ground. I guess real fights don’t stay upright for very long.

I was shooting the live shots at ISO 5000, f/3.2 and hitting speeds of about 1/400-1/500 depending on where they were in the ring. If I was using my backup camera this wouldn’t have been possible, so I would have had to be ‘artistic’ or ‘blurry’ as it’s commonly called.

Going back to my weird talk about time, there was a great opportunity to capture a sequence of shots to tell a story better than one here.

The Ref came in and stopped the fight on the grounds that the guy underneath was in no position to get back in it and was just being hit, so the fight was stopped before any serious injury occurred. I like this mainly because of the Ref’s body language- he’s pushing the guy aside and bringing his right hand in the stop any fists that fly. The lights are kickass too.

Now I can get to the stuff I’m excited about: the before and after shots.

This was quite a ghetto job- one light, one lens. The backdrop was made of a white bed sheet I got from Goodwill for $1.99 which was stuck on the wall with Gorilla tape. I had a 10ft light stand in my bag, with a single light and a single (white) umbrella. Put the stand as high as it will go, angle it down and there we go, I have a studio. You don’t need fancy stuff. It comes in handy and sometimes makes life easier and it sometimes make it more of a pain in the ass.

I’d like to point out that the shot on the right is slightly clipped because the guy was wobbling all over the place. He had a hard time focusing on me, and even though he won his fight, it took its toll.

So there you go. You can see these B I G on my website.

Now I’m going to email Dana White.

Until next time. Thanks for reading!

tez

info@tezmphoto.cm

www.tezmphoto.com

So I just deleted 657 spam comments from my wordpress admin thing. It’s amazing how many people are trying to enhance my bust or send me Nigerian money nowadays.

Anyway, you may have noticed some of these pics on my site. I put a couple of them on there 2 weeks back just because they’re cool and something different- I don’t normally use a plain background, and on this shoot I wanted to go outside to a back alley and do some hardass looking stuff but it was pouring with rain which in reality turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Terrin is an artist. He paints, draws, sketches, ’shops, and he did the inaugural t-shirt design (a big weird looking head) for Grindstone Magazine. The article called his style ‘dark’ and used that adjective numerous times. It doesn’t look all that dark to me though, it isn’t Caravaggio or Beksinski or anything like those guys but they’re pretty messed up so maybe that’s a good thing.

I’m happy with these shots as we were able to get a number of different looks in a 12×12 room with just using one light. It’s good to have space to set things how you want them but sometimes (and on jobs in basement apartments) it isn’t always going to be perfect, and even if it looks perfect, something is bound to go wrong.

This was the shot featured on the magazine’s front cover. It took a while for people to ‘get it’ which surprised me. It came about from a line Chuck Palahnuik said: “everything is a self portrait” which, when you think about it, makes a whole lot of sense. I took it literally to the point of him being his own self-portrait… which makes no sense but it did then. The shot above is all photoshop. Some people commented on it that Terrin drew his own face amazingly accurately which is testament to his drawing ability. He probably could draw his own face like this but it’s a lot quicker to do it in photoshop I think I made a duplicate layer, inverted it, blurred it and set it to color dodge… but I might be making that up because it sounds fancy.

In an editorial shoot, or any shoot when you’re trying to let the audience know what a person is about, get them in their environment doing their thing. Terrin is a painter/artist, but he’s laid back, not up his own ass because he’s a ‘tortured soul’ and I think you can get that from this shot – the clothes, the easel and where it is, the stance. It’s all part of a portrait. Whilst it’s not the best picture anyone ever took of anything ever, it tells you some important factors. I had the light for this in Terrin’s kitchen to the right and pointed a bit behind him, I did that so the light would pull your eye to the right hand side of the pic. I was using a shoot-thru umbrella which is like a silver one but softer and not as contrasty with more of a wraparound look.

this following set looks like it came out of a lifestyle magazine:

I wanted these below to form a triptych of the process of smoking a cigarette and looking cool. This was basically me and Terrin talking shit interspersed with photography.

1/3

2/3

3/3

floating head

This was a plan to allow the magazine to write some copy in the space above Terrin- They ended up fading it into white so it would merge seamlessly with the paper color which looked pretty sweet.

Again, this was just a single light in a white umbrella. It was behind me as high as I could get it and angled down towards the couch.

I wanted to get another set of shots so the magazine would have a lot of scope and options in their layout. You may have noticed a deer head in the corner of the above shots. Terrin picked it up to tell me about it and it just made sense… sort of. His work incorporates themes and interpretations of death and dying so in a rather obscure way, having him hold the head of a dead deer didn’t seem too far removed and hey, it was there so why not?

I only asked him to make out like he was humping it- the point and look are all his own creation.

Again, and you probably know by now. The light was a single light, through an umbrella. I was using the 24-70 for practically all these shots (the ‘drawing himself’ one was with an 85mm).

That’s about it, sorry this is short and sweet but thanks for reading and hopefully you read something that was informative

Until next time.

tez

info@tezmphoto.com