Surreal Portals

I was contacted by a UK based record label wondering if I’d be interested in shooting for one of their newly signed artists. This was the first time a non-USA label reached out to me, so that felt like a pretty cool milestone. After the artist, Solomon reached out to me on instagram, it was clear that we had a lot of similar interests - visually and sonically. We talked through some of Solomon’s ideas while I listened to his music, and he met me at the studio for a shoot.

While eating some tacos downtown, the light starting to get low and we hurried to the studio to get some rooftop shots. The clouds were very interesting and I brought some tricks to add to our surreal vision for the shoot.

I warped my WB magenta/red and put a blue gel on a strobe set up on a light stand and got to shooting. This basically allows me to have greater control of the color when deciding how to grade the final image in a surreal way. So the red in the background/left side of his face is the ambient light, and the flash was initially blue until I brought it into Lightroom for some tweaks. I used a Lens Baby lens to create the motion blur on the outside of the frame.

After the sun went down it was time to get off the roof and into the studio.

I had been painting in the studio and had a bunch of plastic sheeting that we decided to drape over everything. I put the key light on the balcony blasting through the window (red gel), and another strobe to the left for a fill (green gel). We played with a few different shooting styles, but ultimately loved the long exposure shots.

After a solid long-exposure session, we decided to get some cleaner portraits with a projector involved. One of his main themes for his project was a portal, so I made a quick graphic in photoshop and projected it on the wall behind him.

The final look was made with one light, a projector, and a double-exposure for one of the images.

Link to Solomon’s Spotify: here