accomplishedWe'll go backwards. Here's how it all ended up.
Steven Severin, Musician.
You may clickenzee to embiggen.
Rule #1 of Kyle Cassidy's Guide to Rock Star Photography is "Never go in without a plan." Your plan is Plan B -- it's the backup plan, it's your goto if nothing awesome pops up when you get there. Because you only have five minutes to do your thing, you need to be In Charge. Stephanie, Erika, Rebecca, and I worked out something kind of dramatic which was a close, tight light on the face from high above (on the left) but what do you do with that? It's just a floating head. We decided to throw some dramatic light onto the background as well (right) that adds a little more depth and dimension to the portrait. We practiced all this an hour before we were to meet Steven until we were pretty confident about all the camera settings and light placements. This is something I do all the time so that I'm not the guy wandering around the room going "Let me think for a moment," while people tap their toes, look at their watches, and, inevitably, wander off to do something more interesting.
Our initial test setup.
You may clickenzee to embiggen.
When we got to the location, I sent Steph and Becca and Erika out to find "something" (that was the extent of my suggestion) -- an object we could shoot light through and that would create shadows, and I scoped out spaces. There was a big hallway with a blank wooden wall which looks like every ordinary, less than interesting hallway on Earth, but had plenty of room to move about in. This was the place. Our job then became to make it look like a fancy studio.
Becca, Erika and Steph returned with a milk crate, which was perfect. We set up one light with a grid, from high above (left) and the second light we put under the milk crate and aimed at the wall. This gives us all those angular shadows in the final image. We practiced for about 60 seconds to make sure all our settings were right & then we scoped out some other options to see if we could find anything more interesting. There was a window and we thought perhaps we could have Steven looking out through the window with some dramatic light from underneath, so we tried it with ourselves as models and couldn't make it look better than our initial plan.
Steven arrived soon enough and we set to work.
Behind the scenes photos by Kostis.
You may clickenzee to embiggen.
Steven was awesome. Very kind. He's been doing a live soundtrack for Carl Dreyer's 1932 horror film The Vampyr which you can listen to here. It turned out we have friends in common (of course). We talked about how electronics are shrinking the sizes of the kits that we both have to carry around -- he's making music now on a box the size of a briefcase and I'm endeavoring to fit my entire setup, lights, cameras & action, into a smaller and smaller backpack. We noted that if you could tour, musically or photographically, with equipment you can carry by yourself things get so much easier. A lovely time was had by all.
That's kind of what you get taking a class with me.
If you're someone who has done this sort of thing with me, let us know your experience in the comments. What did you learn? What did you do with what you learned later? How's it impacted your work? What kind of things do you want to do next?
Thanks to Stephanie Lifshutz, Erika Herrera, Rebecca Frantz & Kostis Kourelis.
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