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

S A S H A

For my final shoot of 2021, I invited my friend Sasha to the studio to make some images promoting his music and experiment with some new ideas we both had. He had just released an album - From by “S A S H A” so he needed to keep the momentum rolling.

First, we hung out in the studio and listened to his album, thinking about the different themes and how they could be visually represented. I had been collecting glassware with intentions of shooting still-life’s, and he mentioned he thought it would be cool to make an image where he’s floating inside a fishbowl. Boom. That was our first concept.

There were surprisingly a lot of options to shoot through the fishbowl, and a few things I didn’t really expect as well. 

Camera > Lens > Fishbowl > Sasha > Backdrop.

^ Small changes to any of those elements drastically changed the shot.

With the remaining time, we turned off the lights, and played with long exposures, gels, and a projector. For the above shots, I gelled a soft light with blue, and dragged an LED light behind him while triggering the camera with a remote. After the “blue” look, he made some graphics in photoshop, and I projected them into the scene.

Hearing In Color

Shooting content for music projects is a favorite of mine, there are few times where you have the creative freedom that comes with an independent album cover shoot. I use it as a chance to push the limits of my visual style, while also making sure the images make sense for the artist. Josh, @twowaaay contacted me about setting up a shoot for his upcoming single/album releases and I immediately got him in the studio. After we listened to a couple of his songs, I got a sense for his style and knew exactly where to start.

This was the first lighting setup we shot. There was some interesting morning light coming through the windows, and I wanted to utilize that while also having control of the rest of my lights. The yellow in the above image is the natural light streaking through the windows. I warped the WB in my camera, and added 2 additional strobes - a gelled soft box, and a gelled snoot.

We were very happy with the way these turned out, and pretty much knew that one of these would work for a particular song he was promoting, Capetown. On to the next look…

We opted to shift the lights to the other end of the spectrum and work with the warm ambient light. He had brought a few of his instruments as props that we used.

This setup also had a gelled soft box and a gelled standard mount shooting through a hanging plant to create some interest in the background and some scattered light spilling onto Josh. I opted to get loose with the compositions knowing these would likely be cropped down to a square. It was more about getting his different moods while performing on the keys. The above shot was used for the song, Keys.

We had some extra time so we went back to the previous style with a few alterations to the lights and overall feel.

Both of the above images were shot in a very similar way, I just swapped the key light gel from yellow to blue, and changed some WB settings in camera. I also utilized some GOBOs in these two. The picture on the left has the knuckles of a C stand on the left side creating some blurred highlights, and the right-hand picture has a red gel that I cut up and placed in front of the lens. We decided the belt looked better as a necklace/guitar strap.