As you might have guessed from my recent posts, Laura Hollick and I were in NYC last week. We decided to take advantage of this situation to shoot some photos and video in that most iconic of Manhattan locations, Times Square. As a photographer, the challenge was going to be to be able to capture the energy and bright lights of Times Square, while at the same time featuring Laura in a way that made her stand out.
We brought in hair and makeup artist Tim Wilkins to help prepare Laura for the shoot. He did a great job creating a subtle, shimmering and almost elfish look to integrate her silver wig and silver leaf dress.
Once Tim was done with the hair and makeup, Laura and I hopped in cab and headed midtown and into the madness. Anyone who’s been there knows that it’s a total zoo at all hours of day and night. We quickly scouted the area and staked out some sidewalk for our shoot.
I wanted to show the very famous billboards and neon in the background, but allow a close crop that would put the focus on Laura. Shooting from a low angle allowed this to happen. I chose a low shutter speed (1/30) to slightly blur the action around her, and a wide angle lens (24mm) to create some slightly supernatural drama. The wide aperture of f/2.8 created the shallow-ish depth of field effect to separate her from the background as much as possible, but because the lens is wide, the background is still distinguishable. As you might know, the wider your lens, the harder it is to get really shallow depth of field. That was fine though, since I wanted to keep Times Square recognizable as our setting.
The general lighting of the scene was amply provided by the bright billboards all around, and I set them to be slightly over-exposed. I didn’t want the contents of the signs to be too distracting. Over-exposing them slightly allowed them to appear mostly white, with some minor details in them that weren’t terribly distinguishable. All of this meant that Laura was in silhouette, so I added a fill light to make her pop. I set up my trusty little Vivitar 283 flash up high on a light stand and put a diffusing lens in front of it to soften it a bit. With such bright backlighting and no modeling light to preview the foreground, it was like shooting in the dark. I could only see her dark form against the bright background in the viewfinder. I trusted my camera’s autofocus to keep Laura in focus, and just posed her based on her silhouetted shape.
We shot for about half an hour. I didn’t think that our little photo shoot would create even the tiniest stir amidst all of the madness of Times Square, but I was wrong. We amassed a pretty-good sized audience, who mostly stood behind me. Often, people wanted to pose with photos with Laura and ask us questions.
It was a little distracting, but also fun to think that we added something to the experience of a few New York City visitors. When we finished shooting, I was surprised by a loud round of applause that broke out behind us! It was quite a night. Here’s the final image we selected from the shoot.
Here’s another image I shot after I was sure we’d gotten what we’d intended to shoot. I experimented by putting on a super-wide lens (12mm) and moved the camera during the long exposure. I still used the flash to sort of freeze a portion of the action. I like the vibrant, semi-abstract feel of this one.
We also shot some video to promote Laura’s Soul Art® Certification program.
It’s been a while since Laura Hollick and I created a new image for our Live Your Spirit series. We planned for an outdoor image, showing Laura posed like a white tree in a white winter landscape. We drove around through the country until we spotted the perfect location, just outside of a little church in Westover, Ontario. It had what we needed: a place to park nearby, a slight hill covered in snow, and a not-too-distracting background.
We did a few test shots to get an idea of the composition of the final image.
We had to work quickly. Although the thermometer read above zero, the wind was whipping in towards the camera, and quite violently too. I would estimate it was coming in at about 60-70 km/h, making it feel much colder than the true temperature. My light stands kept blowing over, and I had to dig them deep into the snow so that they would stay up. It’s a good thing hair and makeup artist Sue Upton affixed the wig very securely to Laura’s head, otherwise we could have had a real hair disaster that day!
Our plan was to wrap Laura tightly with white fabrics to create the tree costume. I moved as quickly as possible to clamp the fabrics around her using plastic clips. Canvas cones would create the “root” system of the tree. However, because the wind was so strong, the fabric kept blowing loose. We decided that we were going to work with what nature gave us, and I shot a number of frames of Laura dancing with the flapping fabrics. The tree quickly transformed into a winter wind angel. We couldn’t shoot for long, because it was extremely cold, and there was real risk of windburn and frostbite to Laura’s exposed skin.
After reviewing the images in the car, we decided that the canvas cones weren’t “reading” as well as we’d imagined, so we went out again to shoot some more photos of the base of the dress without the cones. I later blended one of these cone-less bases into the image using Photoshop.
This image is technically a little different from my other ones. Usually, I shoot with lenses wide open so that I get shallow depth of field and can isolate my subject. In this case, because I needed a shutter speed of 1/200 to sync with the strobes, the aperture had to be set to the polar opposite, f/22.0. This was the about one stop underexposed for the natural light, and it gave us a very mysterious looking sky, with the winter sun struggling to gleam through the low clouds. I lit Laura using two Alien Bees B800 strobes at nearly full intensity, powered by the Vagabond II battery pack.
A few months ago, Laura Hollick and I worked with talented makeup artist and painter Sue Upton to create a photo of Laura taking off with her red bird spirit. In the shoot, we merged Sue’s painting and body-painting skills with Laura’s vision and my photography. It’s always fun to collaborate closely with a team of people who each contribute their own unique skills. I end up learning a lot about what is possible, even when it comes to my own medium of photography.
The process began with some preliminary snapshots to experiment with the poses and the positioning of the painting. Sue then sketched a few different bird designs onto these printouts to get a rough idea of how it was going to look. We wanted to add a branch so that there would be some context to the pose, and so it wouldn’t look like Laura was just floating there in mid-air, but rather stepping off into the unknown with the red bird as her guide. In the sketches below, you can see that Sue used white correction fluid to highlight the best image so that it could be most easily projected onto the backdrop for tracing and then painting.
Painting Laura and the backdrop took hours of meticulous work. The shoot was spread out over two days because we actually shot two completely different poses. Each of the poses required different background and body painting. It was a test of patience and stamina for everyone involved.
The actual photography was quite simple. I wanted good depth of field and even, soft lighting with few shadows. Two Alien Bees B800 flash units set close to their maximum power, modified with brolly boxes provided this bright and diffuse light. I also wanted to stand fairly far back and shoot with as long a focal length as was possible. Laura’s big studio gave me lots of room to do this. All of these techniques were designed to flatten the image so that it would blend Laura with her surroundings as seamlessly as possible.
Here are the final images. What do you think?
Please also read Laura’s fascinating blog post about this shoot.
