Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Rebecca Breeden

From intense sports action to high fashion Carlos Serrao has a distinct look that elevates his subjects to visual stardom.  His crisp light and subtle color palette have illuminated the faces of Jack Nicholson, Will Ferrell and Kobe Bryant and have brought him a list of advertising and editorial clients including Sony, Nike, GQ, and TIME.

Recently I interviewed Carlos Serrao about his career, craft and the creation of our featured image. We begin discussing the clever problem-solving and technical achievements that went into creating this series that was shot for a Nike ad campaign.  The latter part of our interview details Serrao’s creative inspiration, post-production methods and recent motion projects.

Final image Carlos Serrao shot for Nike

Seckler: Tell me about the concept for our featured image you did for Nike .

Serrao: The concept was for this Nike Pro under-apparel for use in cold weather. The (ad agency) wanted to illustrate it in a way that was obviously a little bit exaggerated. So, I came up with this concept of cold-looking vapor trails coming off the body. In effect, it showed not only the motion of the athlete but also displayed the cold.

Seckler: Did they have an idea of how they wanted to execute it, or did they come to you and say, “Hey Carlos, how are we going to do this?”

Serrao: They didn’t really have an idea how do it… this could go really well or this could look really cheesy. It’s just one of those things where it sounds great but can work without looking crazy.

Seckler: And so what were your ideas?

Serrao: Well, I don’t like it to look digitally composited at all, if possible. So funny enough, I had just watched the DVD of one of my favorite movies from the ’80s, John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” They shot that movie partially in arctic-circle country, but some of the stuff was shot in Los Angeles in a freezer. They actually built some of the sets in a freezer. I was like, “Aw, so cool, we can shoot in the freezer!” So we gave it a little bit of a run-through in a small freezer, just to make sure it would work. It was one of those things where you can’t really test it until you’ve shot it.

Seckler: So how did you shoot it?

Serrao: We shot the athletes for five days in a soundstage in Oakland, just to get the black background. We laid down either astroturf or real turf so they can actually (perform the action) and then the rest was shot on black. We’d be shooting these stadium plates at night, so it’s lit more harshly because I always try to match what lighting we are going to do even though we hadn’t even shot the background yet.

Steam shot in studio

We used mostly brocolor lights so we could control our flash duration. Since we knew we were going to be putting them into stadium situations in post, we light to mimic the hard direct lighting of Musco lighting at a nighttime match. We used p65 large reflectors high in a semi circle behind athletes as the keys, and set up three12×12 silks in a semi circle in front of athletes and behind camera for a soft fill in front…and to also give us a bigger sweet spot. We shot it around f 5.6-f 8, with the flash duration set on the packs at no less than 1/2000 of a sec.  We shot with a hasselblad H3 31mxpl camera, using a range of prime lens

es 100mm to 250mm.  We set up 20×20 duvetyne to stop balls from flying everywhere and also protecting the set.

Then we did the nighttime plates at universities or high schools, from let’s say 10 at night to 6 a.m. Originally, we dressed the sets to be a little bit colder, with snow on the ground… in the middle of the summer. We had a lot of moisture, which filled the air with haze and fog. But at the last minute, the (marketing) client decided that we had to take all that snow out.

Stadium background plate

We did that all night, and then that morning we had to go to the freezers because that was the only time it was available. We rented in San Francisco’s meat-packing district a huge walk-in freezer. My prop guy would jump in the shot, quickly spritz the (athlete) down with hot water, and steam would rise off his body. And then he would do a kick. Also, to get a really exaggerated breath, we had a mannequin head that our prop guy had bored out the nostrils and the mouth, and we actually stuck the steamer through there and had that coming out with a little bit more pressure. We backlit that for a decent exposure of vapor. And then we had the athlete moving, doing the kick. At that temperature it shows up quite a bit. So all of the elements you see of the vapor and smoke are actually vapor that we reused.

Seckler: And you had the Astroturf in the freezer too?

Serrao: Yeah. I never have anybody doing fake stuff, so if they’re kicking a ball they’re kicking a ball. If they’re running, they’re running. And the pro athlete we were shooting was a rookie on the U.S. men’s soccer team who had never been photographed before. He kicked the ball as hard as he could. He slipped, and the ball careened into the camera, smashing it into pieces. The pocket wizard snapped off and cut me to the bone, right underneath my eye. So I, um, was knocked out for a second and blood gushed out and was all over the place. And I turned to the athlete and was like, “Oh, dude, it’s cool, man.” And he’s like, “It’s not cool (laughs).” So I had to go to the hospital and get stitched up. So next time I shoot a rookie maybe I’ll just use a longer lens.

Seckler: So what did you do exactly to get this stadium to look so cold?

Image from Carlos Serrao's portfolio

Serrao: We had an Igeba, a heavy-duty fogger that’s really loud and noisy. I think it uses oil instead of water vapor… to kind of get that mist in the air. We were hoping — shooting in San Francisco — to get that gloomy marine air, even in the summer. It didn’t cooperate with us, so we had to make our own with the fogger, which is why you have that sort of flarey look off the stadium lights. We also wet down the grass, giving us a sort of frost. And the rest of it is just kind of giving it a profile with a lot of shifting the blacks to a little blue, making it a little bit more open.

Seckler: Your color palettes are really unique and beautiful, and obviously that comes into play in retouching. So tell me about your relationship with the retoucher and how you come up with a color palette for a project.

Serrao: I’ve work closely for years with both my digital tech and the retoucher. I originally started, like a lot of people, with film. I would go print it myself at the lab. I would do my own palettes in actual analog color printing, so I already had an understanding and a direction I already liked, which is why I like to use the same people, to get them on the same kind of page. We supply the retoucher with tons of notes, and I have some basic, decent skills to mock things up, and an understanding of what will work the best for her. I’m obsessed with trying to make it as not-Photoshopped as possible, so the biggest compliment is when someone doesn’t realize we weren’t actually there shooting it… when it doesn’t look like it’s totally composited.

Seckler: Do you know what the color palette’s going to look like before you start shooting? Or does it change on set or afterward?

Image from Carlos Serrao's portfolio

Serrao: I have a pre-visualized idea of what I want it to be, and for the most part it ends up being that way. For a job like this I pulled enough reference material, whether it be stills from movies or whatever, to have a general palette that I like. And it’s just a matter of, from the very first shot, working on it.

Seckler: Your lighting has a distinct look as well. Where does the inspiration for your lighting come from?

Serrao: This is maybe something dumb that I got to get over, but I even want the pieces (of each composite) to look like decent, finished shots. I’m getting over it a little bit, but if I’m doing, say, the shot of the athletes against black, if that black isn’t completely clean, the background, if there’s part of the frame being folded down, you see half the studio or whatever, it drives me crazy.

Whenever I go to a location I try to imagine where the light would really be falling because I don’t want to feel the strobes in the room. But there are strobes because for whatever reason we have to freeze the action. Recently we’ve been doing a lot of work with 18ks and hot lights, trying out new things as well. But that comes from trying to make it look as real as possible, but in a hyper-real way.

Seckler: Tell me how you got your start as a photographer.

Serrao: I used to do, as a kid, little Super 8s, and then moved to video. A lot of skateboard stuff in high school. When I graduated I started shooting for the local weekly paper, like the Village Voice of Miami. It wasn’t necessarily chasing ambulances or reportage. It was more like spending three or four days with a family that got flooded out of the Everglades, or a portrait of this politician. It was pretty cool because I’d run out and spend days shooting the stuff, which taught me how to be fast. And since it was a weekly paper, I could be a little bit more illustrative. I remember some politician guy who happened to be in a wheelchair who was being charged with sexual harassment or something. So the art directors and I would work on it together. “OK, let’s make this shot a little more moody. Take it back to the darkroom, and maybe do some stuff. Make it darker around the edges, or vignette it, or whatever.” So I bought that mindset.

Seckler: How did your career progress after your experience at the paper?

Image from Carlos Serrao's portfolio

Serrao: I essentially moved out to Los Angeles and started working for the papers here…(shooting) mostly celebrities. So all of that technical know-how I’d picked up at the paper translated to shooting celebrities and actors and famous people, and still working very fast to do it. I started shooting an ad, and of course that brought in bigger magazines because they would say, “Oh, you shot this person? It came out really cool. Well, here.” So it went from there, jumped to national magazines, and then it was just a progression into fashion shoots that were a bit more conceptual. I never really assisted; I always just shot. One thing always led to another. You know, we’re just making this stuff up as we go along. We’re learning as we go, so that’s kind of the fun part.

Seckler: What separates the visual style of your photography from other people? What’s the Carlos Serrao look?

Serrao: I always revert back to the cinema quality. I want the photographs, technical or not, to convey a feeling or a story. So I just try to do that by … whatever I get out of a subject. But sometimes these subjects aren’t really actors or models or whatever, so I try to convey that through the look of the atmosphere.

Seckler: So what is it about the film look that interests you? Why do you gravitate toward that?

Serrao: The films that I’m drawn to — by the lighting and the atmosphere and the look — can emote a feeling… I just like that when you look at these things they really put thought into the overall aspect.

Image from Carlos Serrao's portfolio

Seckler: You’ve been doing some motion work as well, haven’t you?

Serrao: One of the photographers who assists me and I decided to do this (project) just for fun. Opened up Final Cut for the first time. Edited it together and sent it to him. All these magazines were like, “We need online content! We need stuff for the iPad!” They had very small budgets but enough to make it fun for us. We try to marry the two things (stills and film) so it feels like it’s all from the same voice. I always think it’s strange to send someone to film a photo shoot, and it looks nothing like the stills you see in the magazine. So we try to give it the same type of quality. We can’t compete with, like, a $1 million Nike spot with all the CGI and everything, so we try to make things have a point of view and be creative and clever. We’re almost saying, let’s pretend there is no such thing as CGI or any kind of crazy after effects. Let’s just try to make fun little things, and work our way up from there.

Seckler: Are you interested in doing more motion work?

Image from Carlos Serrao's portfolio

Serrao: Yeah! I mean, if someone wants to hire us to do what we do, that would be the goal. But we don’t want to do anything that we don’t normally do.

Seckler: So you don’t want to do a spot for something that’s not representative of your style.

Serrao: Right. If someone asks, “Hey, Carlos, could you shoot an advertisement for this technical underwear for Nike?” I’d be like, cool, yeah, because all of the things involved with it are cool to me. But to do the same rap for the film stuff, we’re not really jumping at the chance to do that unless it could be done in the style or in the voice that we want to be in.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

Photographer Kevin Cooley isn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, he’s almost like a cat, using the cover of darkness as his opportunity to go out and hunt – for pictures. He’s known for using the night sky like a giant canvass and a plethora of manmade light sources like paintbrushes to create stunning fine art and editorial imagery.

Cooley has used everything from the light of jet engines flying thousands of feet above his lens to flares shot into the depths of cold wintry landscapes to expose his photographs. His inventive techniques and striking aesthetic have brought him much success in the art world. In the past few years he’s landed multiple grants, artist residencies, solo exhibitions, major awards and scores of magazine clients.

We recently had a chance to sit down and discuss his career and craft. Our interview begins with the concept and creation of our featured image “Badlands 2,” a photo from his series At Light’s Edge. We continue on to discuss how Cooley conceptualizes projects, where he finds creative inspiration and his path of becoming a successful artist.

Seckler: Let’s discuss our featured image, one from your series At Light’s Edge.

Cooley: This image was created before dawn on a cold, snowy morning near the small town of Lyman in Southwestern Wyoming. To create the streak in the sky, I used an old military flare.  After a long period of failed experimentation with model rockets, fireworks, and marine flares, I settled on military flares for two reasons. They are very bright and enjoy a nice long hang-time in the air of around 8-10 seconds. Second, I really liked their predictable trajectories, something which I wasn’t getting with the other methods I tested. The flares are all from various militaries in Eastern Europe and date from the late 1970’s and 80’s.   I was surprised to find hardly any duds in the entire gross I used for this project.

Seckler: What was the technical process of creating this image?

Cooley: The camera I used is a Linhof Technikardan 45s with a 135mm Schneider apo-symmar lens.  I remember that at the time, I thought I was shooting with Kodak Portra 160VC at an exposure of four or five minutes at f22. However, when I got back to the hotel, I realized that I accidentally shot Kodak Portra 400NC.   I think this mistake worked out to my advantage in making the flare even brighter. I only had time to shoot 2 frames before I was visited by a state trooper who wanted to know why my car was stopped along the side of the highway so early in the morning. Luckily for me, it did not seem as he had seen two flares we had already shot off. But I thought it best not to take any more chances.

Seckler: Where did you come of with the idea for this series?

Cooley: From an emotional point of view, the series is about feeling lost in my environment and struggling to cope with the human condition. It’s also about feeling like the world can get the best of you and being lonely; it’s very existential. Loneliness is a theme I’ve been exploring for a long time. I often photograph alone; it’s a meditative experience for me. Mentally, I go to strange, sometimes subliminal, places. I guess it says a lot about me as a person, but it also speaks to the universal human condition. We all have to deal with the harshness of the world. Speaking from a literal point of view, the light from the flares is like a distress signal, a call for help, like you’re lost in a stark, unforgiving landscape. I shot those images mostly in Wyoming and Idaho during the depths of winter.

Seckler: Is there a metaphorical element to it?

Cooley: When you look at the pictures, you see a white streak and you might not necessarily know what’s going on. Is the flare coming up, or is it going down? Is it from outer space? Is it lightning? You know, I like to leave the images open to interpretation. I purposefully chose not to use red distress flares to make it more ambiguous.

Seckler: Much of your work is done at night using only ambient light, where did this habit originate from?

Cooley: The very first project I did at night was a series called Night for Night, which is an industry term. It started when I came across an amazing-looking film set in Red Hook, Brooklyn. They were shooting A Beautiful Mind, and there was a gigantic oil tanker that was lit up. They weren’t even shooting the tanker; it was only a part of the background. I started to think about how light is used in film, and how much of it is not used, and what else is being lit on set. That thread sparked the idea that I should surreptitiously borrow hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide (HMI) lights from different films sets. Before I knew it, I was in Los Angeles for six months following various film productions.

Seckler: Did people ever wonder why you were stalking around film sets?

Cooley: Film crews in New York got to know me well. They offered me craft services, asked me if I was getting what I needed. I almost felt like a part of the productions. In Los Angeles, my reception was less well received. Even though I was blocks away from the set, and not interested in whomever was being shot—meaning that I was clearly not a paparazzo—I was not treated well. Sometimes, the cops that are paid to be on set would get involved. They’d say, “You know, actually, he can shoot here. It’s totally fine. He’s not even bothering the crew.”

Seckler: How did your night shooting progress?

Cooley: Each project has been shot at night, but each one also uses a slightly different light source, the first one being the big film HMIs. Next, I did a project in Paris, France, during a six-month artist-in-residency program, where I used the lights from Bateaux-Mouches, tourist boats that travel along the Seine.

Seckler: Is your choice of lighting a matter of convenience or aesthetics?

Cooley: When I first started the Night for Night series I was looking for locations that were lit by massive lights, and I was thinking, what would I do if I had those lights for myself? And I realized that I didn’t know what I would do. It was more about seeking what was lit; the accidental occurrence of the experience intrigued me. When I photograph, I always feel most comfortable reacting to what I see, rather than setting up my own scenario.

Seckler: What originally prompted your interest in photography?

Cooley: I came to New York to go to the School for Visual Arts (SVA) in 1997. But I was shooting before that. Television has always been a major part of my upbringing. My family had televisions in almost every room. My father couldn’t sleep without a television playing. My mom slept in a different room, and she had a television. I had television in my bedroom when I was a kid. Television imagery is how I learned about the world. I think that it’s only natural that I became interested in capturing the world visually.

Seckler: When did you start working professionally?

Cooley: In my second year of grad school we had a photographer join us who was a well-connected commercial, editorial photographer in Australia. Before I met him I was thinking only about being an artist. He introduced me to commercial photography. Since graduate school I’ve been trying to navigate between being an editorial photographer, a commercial photographer, and a fine artist. The first few years after I graduated I assisted and then I started doing my own projects, mainly the Night for Night series.

Seckler: Tell me about your work as an editorial and commercial photographer.

Cooley: There are aspects I like about editorial and commercial photography, but I don’t see how I could fully commit to either. I like making personal work, because I do whatever I want, and I can take as much time as I need. But I also like getting an assignment to go somewhere. I love traveling. I love having to go somewhere to find a picture where there’s not an obvious picture—like having the situation be pressured. I appreciate the challenge of representing a story or an editorial point of view.

Seckler: How do you split yourself mentally between commercial or editorial projects and fine art?

Cooley: I used to think I could do it all. I thought, I could go somewhere and shoot an editorial portrait in the morning, and then shoot something different in the afternoon and just always have a zillion ideas, but the more refined I got at doing what I wanted to do, the more distracted I felt. I find it really hard to turn one off or turn one on, to immediately switch.

Seckler: Tell me about how you conceptualize an idea for a series.

Cooley: It happens organically. I often go for long periods where I have no ideas. Once I start working on a series I eventually get to a point where I feel like I’ve got it, maybe after 15 or 20 pictures. I probably could push it, shoot for another year or so, but then I lose interest. I also go through short periods where I don’t shoot as much or I try things that don’t work and then I see something that suddenly sparks a new idea.

Seckler: It sounds like a very organic, even serendipitous process.

Cooley: I wish I could sit down with pieces of paper and access what I need, and that process is probably not any easier than what I do, but I certainly like to fantasize about it being easier. I’m not good at brainstorming. I mostly hunt for what I shoot. Last summer I started thinking about fireflies as a light source. I didn’t know how to get a bunch of them together, but I started looking into it and realized that there are fireflies in Cambodia that sync up and flash at the same time. I thought, that could be an idea. At the same time my wife found this place in Vieques, Puerto Rico, that has dinoflagellates in the water that light up at night when you move, so I’m going there to photograph them.

Seckler: When you have an idea, like using fireflies as a light source, are you thinking only about something that interests you personally, or are you thinking about an audience that may or may not like the work?

Cooley: I think about making a visually dynamic photograph. I want my work to end up in a gallery or be presented in a magazine, but I try not to work with those goals as my motivation. Where the work ends up, or if it goes anywhere, is not as important.

Seckler: In terms of making a living as a fine artist, is it difficult to rely on galleries to sell your work?

Cooley: My gallery closed in December, so it’s hard. I don’t have gallery representation right now. I don’t think anything in photography is necessarily reliable; it’s all a challenge.

Seckler: How did you get your first solo show?

Cooley: Artist Jen DeNike approached me to be in a group show. About a year later I showed the gallerist some new work and he absolutely hated it and told me if I wanted to be in the art world I should be more consistent. Then he called me on the following Monday and offered me a show. I was shocked. I said, “Really? I thought you hated the work.” And he replied, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, so I guess I couldn’t hate it that much.” He had such a reaction to it that he spent the whole weekend thinking about it. I guess he felt if it captured his attention, then there must be something there.

Seckler: Is there an overarching theme in your work?

Cooley: The work is an extension of me, of my life, and my perception of the world. I think the world is a lonely, harsh, yet beautiful place, and one full of dualities, inconsistencies, and disasters. But in all of that, there’s beauty that I want to capture.

Seckler: Let’s discuss your motion work. Tell me about those projects.

Cooley: During my airplane series, I spent hours sitting near airports, watching planes take off, listening to birds chirp, watching boats go by, and I always felt like the photographs that represented that time didn’t fully reveal the experience of actually being there, which compelled me to shoot video. In a video you could get closer to the nature, especially near JFK, where there are waterways. There are birds flying, fish jumping, and it’s calm and serene. Then you suddenly hear a roaring jet come through and destroy everything. And then it goes away, and you’re back to nature. By using video I could definitely make my audience understand that there is nature, there is a human-made airplane, and noise. I ended up doing a bunch of videos, some in the same locations as the photographs, and I think they worked very well together.

Seckler: Have the videos been exhibited?

Cooley: I showed them at my last gallery show. I think it only made it more dynamic to have both video and photography; it enabled a richer dialog. I feel like video has long been important in the art world, even though it seems like commercial and editorial photographers are just now starting to fully explore HD video.

Seckler: What’s next for you?

Cooley: I’m doing this project in Puerto Rico and then doing something with bioluminescence, with fireflies. I have no idea if it’s going to work; it could be a total failure. Next, I want to go out West and drive around, which really inspires me. In 2011, I plan to sublet my apartment, get a camper, and go away for six months and drive around North America. But while I’m still in New York, I want to do a project about fires. There was a seven-alarm fire in Chinatown several weeks ago, and it got me thinking, so I bought a police scanner and I’ve been listening to it, hoping to find some good stuff.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

Canadian photographer Chris Gordaneer is well-known for bringing a soft color palate and a painterly touch to his advertising imagery. Regardless of the subject matter — a herd of horses galloping straight towards his camera or a woman calmly sitting beneath a tree — there’s always a sense of quiet drama in his photographs. This signature look has been very fruitful; he’s won over 100 awards in the past twelve years.

It’s more than just his mantelpiece that’s impressive though, Gordaneer tackles a seemingly endless variety of subject matter and consistently comes away with beautiful images. From automotive, to sports, to lifestyle, portraiture, landscape, sports…you name it and he’s probably shot it. There’s certainly a lot to learn from Chris Gordaneer’s photographic journey.

We begin our interview discussing a deceiving image of what appears to simply be a polluted city. The reality, and how the image was created, turns out to be far from simple. We then talk about the evolution of his look and how he achieves it in Photoshop. Our discussion finishes on the topic of motion. Gordaneer has much to say about where he and the photographers of Westside Studio are taking the new medium and about how it compares psychologically to shooting still images.

Seckler: Let’s discuss our featured image, the cityscape image.

Gordaneer: The client was Bosch Appliances. The idea was floating around for six, seven months before I got the job, but when I went to a couple of art directors in Toronto, they didn’t think that it could be achieved photographically. They were considering 3-D renderings and illustrations. I convinced them to shoot it using scale models of refrigerators, stoves and dishwashers.

Seckler: Can you describe the layout?

Gordaneer: It was more of a paper drawing. I had references of how they wanted the image to feel like it was a polluted city. The idea of the ad is that Bosch has green appliances that use less energy than older appliances and I wanted to make the photograph look like a dense, overpopulated cityscape with lots of pollution.

Seckler: How did you execute it?

Gordaneer: We had 150 appliances made to 1/10-scale that were then arranged by myself, my producer Tom, and a prop person. We had them made in roughly two weeks for about $12,000 dollars. They were largely plastic with wooden parts for handles and they looked very authentic. They were all distressed and made to look old.

We had tubes going around the background attached to smoke machines that gave that effect of smoke rising from some of the “buildings.” We ended up shooting from two distinct angles. We shot 150 mini appliances on one side and then moved them around to the other side because we didn’t have enough models to totally fill the space. So we moved them back and then digitally it made it feel like they went on and on forever.

I lit this using four Profoto heads each with zoom reflectors attached to two Acute 2400 WS power packs. These were mounted about three feet above a large full stop silk that was stretched out over the props. We put 4’ x 8’ sheets of white foamcore along the sides of the set to reflect light back in. We also painted the back wall grey so there would be less fill from what would have otherwise been a very light reflective white background. I shot using a Phase One P45 Plus back attached to a Mamiya 645AFD III with a 35mm lens. The exposure was 1/125th of a second at f/11 and100 ISO. We combined six separate shots in post to create the final image. The shoot took about three days total to complete.

Seckler: What about the sky?

Gordaneer: The sky was actually a sky I shot separately. This particular sky was shot in Switzerland, I think. I toned it differently and then saturated it to give it a kind of smoky tobacco feel.

Seckler: Tell me about the retouching process for this image.

Gordaneer: The retouching was difficult. Because I didn’t have enough space in the studio to give the image the feeling of depth I desired—where the buildings in the background appear to go back until they are out of focus—so I had those drawn in. I also added more smoke in the background so it feels like they fall into nothing – an endless city of appliances.

Seckler: It’s a fantastic image. How did the client respond?

Gordaneer: They were quite impressed by it. The art director, Paul Wallace, was impressed with it because he couldn’t see it happening in a photograph [without CGI]. They trusted me when I was telling them about it, but Wallace didn’t think it was going to work.

Seckler: So why do you think they ended up listening to you and doing all of this in camera as opposed to CGI?

Gordaneer: They wanted it to feel real. The image could have looked so different. It could have looked hokey. When people see this image, they give it a second look. First, they look at the polluted city, and then they think, ‘What the hell? It’s refrigerators and stoves!’

Seckler: Most of your work is location based, are you interested in pursuing more studio work?

Gordaneer: No. I am not crazy about working in a studio. You’re definitely trapped inside for days. That particular shoot was a lot of fun. It was like building a big puzzle, and you know, it was quite challenging. I liked that aspect of it.

Seckler: How did you first get interested in photography?

Gordaneer: I was 18 and working at a lumberyard outside of Toronto and didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took off to Europe. I had always been into music and painting, but I couldn’t do either, so I thought I should try photography. I went to school for photography when I returned, but I quit during my second year to work as an intern at Westside, the largest studio in Canada. In the beginning I assisted, and then I became an associate, and now I’m a partner.

Seckler: You have a very distinct style. Tell me how that evolved…

Gordaneer: In the beginning, photographers generally emulate the photographers with whom they work. You work with them so much that your own style tends to go in the same direction. But that’s a big mistake. Photographers should work on their own books. I’ve always loved softer color palettes. I don’t like hard, contrasting colors. I like color that’s a little saturated, like crunchy blacks. My style has a very surreal feeling. I also think that it’s softer. People tend to gravitate toward softer color palettes.

Seckler: When did you discover that you liked softer colors?

Gordaneer: I’ve liked them all my life. In paintings, I gravitated toward Goya for his darker, moody stuff, and Monet, for his soft colors. Even in photography, I have always been a fan of black and white images. My favorite photographers are war journalists.

Seckler: How did you get your first jobs?

Gordaneer: I was 24 when I started shooting in 1992. At that time, clients were looking for a fresh look. In the beginning my images were high contrast—very bright, very bold—and edgy. One of the first ads I did was for a company called Manager Jeans; it was my big break.  I became very busy. I knew a lot of art directors, which was key. If you know people, and they know you’re confident and willing to take a risk, they’ll hire you.

Seckler: How did you come to know those art directors?

Gordaneer: I met many art directors by assisting photographers. When I first started I pounded the pavement and called art directors and asked to come by and show them my book. I also did mailers and entered contests. Direct mail is massive. Advertise. Advertise. Advertise.

Back then, in the 1990s, I dealt directly with art directors. Now there are more art buyers in Canada, but in the United States, too, Westside has worked mainly with art directors. Either way it’s strange, because the buyers usually have a lot of say and they are the ones you speak with first even before talking with the art directors.

Seckler: Tell me about your post-production process. You mentioned that you shoot skies and then composite them into other photos. How did you arrive at such a specific vision?

Gordaneer: Each shot is different. With location work, you never know what the weather is going to do, or how the light is going to hit your subject at a certain time of day. You can prep for it, but it’s constantly changing.

I always have a game plan. I go out and scout locations myself. I’ll choose them, but the client has the final say. And then I wait for the perfect light and sky. I am still a true photographer in that way. I wait for things to happen, but I always have the images of the skies in my back pocket. I have them on set with me and I just rough them in as I’m shooting. That way I can see exactly what I’m going to get because I haven’t done major retouching on the color. Much of the work is done in camera, maybe dropping in the sky, or exposing differently for the sky than the foreground. It’s the same sky; it’s just that I’m exposing it differently.

Seckler: How do you enhance colors in post-production? Do you use a lot of selective color?

Gordaneer: Yes. I use plug-ins as well. I have plug-ins like Pixel Genius and Photo Kit. They are quick steps, but I use them slightly, not very much. I also use selective color and saturation, just playing with minor adjustments, though not much because the images get too digitized.

Seckler: Tell me about your portraiture work.

Gordaneer: I do a lot of portraits on location, but in the studio, it’s a whole different game. You have to communicate and make people feel relaxed, which is difficult with celebrities. They don’t want to be there; they sit for photographers constantly.

Seckler: Do you have any tricks for getting people to relax?

Gordaneer: I try to make them laugh and goof-off a bit. Everybody is the same on my sets; there’s no hierarchy. When it comes to shooting, I’m the boss, but everybody is encouraged to relax. The atmosphere is very welcoming. The light’s a little low, so it seems warm and inviting as opposed to bright white light.

Seckler: Are the Tanzania images on your website a part of your personal work?

Gordaneer: Yes. Those images are close to my heart. I do a lot of charity work. I went to Tanzania for a three-week safari and shot those. I had a show when I came back and I donated all the proceeds to World Wildlife Fund (WWF). I raised money for them that helped build water purification plants in the Congo.

Seckler: Did you book everything on your own?

Gordaneer: We did research. My producer Tom did most of that work. We actually started off at a fair-trade coffee plantation. The majority of the money that we spent there will stay in the country. It was quite expensive, but we spent three days on the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, basically living on a coffee plantation.

Seckler: So you basically donated your time and money to create images that were then sold for charity?

Gordaneer: Yes. At the end it was about $40,000 dollars with the show, the prints, the framing, and everything that we auctioned off, but I raised about $20,000 dollars from the sales of the prints, so it was worth it.

Seckler: Tell me about your motion work. When did you start shooting?

Gordaneer: Many production companies approach me to direct. I just think that you have to do either still photography or motion work. I am not finished shooting; my love is still photography. The [still photography] jobs are quicker, you can do more, and you can move a lot easier than with motion. But I do see our worlds colliding. As far as still cameras go, and how digital high-def cameras are going to go, I think one day soon they are going to be shooting stills as well. So I am definitely trying to learn more.

Seckler: Do clients come to you for motion work—even though you’re primarily a still photographer—and say, ‘We love Chris’s vision and we want to see him bring that to motion, so we’re going to take a risk.’

Gordaneer: There’s not much difference between motion and stills; it’s just a moving picture. A lot of photographers see that way when they shoot. I definitely do; I see in motion. The main thing is to tell a story in images. With moving pictures, it’s just a longer, more complicated process. I think, especially in motion, more people are involved. You’re not the only creator.

Seckler: Does it seem strange to be a [motion picture] director—to step out of the role of still photographer—and adopt a new role?

Gordaneer: In still photography, you’re a director. You’re directing and basically being a vice president. The [motion] world is not that different. It’s harder to let go of taking the actual picture, but I look at the vice presidents and I’m jealous of them—that’s what I want to do at some point.

Seckler: You mentioned that you see the worlds of still and motion photography colliding. Tell me more about what you expect from that convergence.

Gordaneer: Most clients would love to have a print campaign that is exactly the same as their commercials. I think that the photography world is going to shrink. Most clients will be combining campaigns.

Seckler: Does Westside Studio have a vision to turn their still photographers into motion picture directors?

Gordaneer: We are definitely moving in that direction. We are all playing with the Canon 5D Mark II. Photographers are doing major features on it. There are a lot of still photographers who are very excited about the technology.

Seckler: Is everybody building a reel?

Gordaneer: Everybody is trying to build a reel. We are forming alliances with transfer houses, editing houses. We are meeting with them and they are learning our needs as well. I shot a couple small-budget spots recently and the clients loved them and came back for more.

Seckler: How do you suggest that still photographers build a reel since it is such a different thing then building a typical portfolio?

Gordaneer: Experiment. Go out, and if you’re shooting a job, shoot some video, too. It’s just as if you were building a book for the first time—you have to shoot and shoot. It’s good practice. It doesn’t always have to be your best work. Just make the mistakes. You never know what’s going to happen. I am a firm believer in happy accidents.

Seckler: Is the style of your still photography revealing itself in your motion work?

Gordaneer: Sure. Sometimes I’ll shoot stills and have a camera guy beside me shooting video, shooting exactly what I’m seeing. There is one photograph of a horse bucking—the production team had a separate camera guy with me who just followed me around and shot all my ideas. I think people get nervous when they hear motion, but it’s not much different then shooting stills. In my world I am used to dealing with big productions, so I am not nervous when it comes to making that jump.

Seckler: So even though you want to mostly remain a still photographer, you’re experimenting with motion because you think that’s where things are going…

Gordaneer: Yes. The two worlds are definitely going to merge. I am still young, still shooting, and I don’t want to be left behind. Plus, it’s exciting. When I say I don’t want to be involved in motion as much, I mean that I don’t want to be involved with big production companies. I don’t want to give up photography and concentrate solely on directing. I don’t want to spend a month on a project, I really don’t. You write treatments. You have pre-production, and you’re casting actors and scouting locations and you’re not getting paid for that time. You only get paid for the days that you’re on set. And afterward you are usually involved in the transfer and the edit, or you walk away from it and it’s out of your hands, and then you see it on TV and you hate it.

Seckler: Do you see motion as a negative development?

Gordaneer: No, I don’t, but I don’t like having all those people around me. I like having total control. I don’t care for shoots when there are too many hands in the pie. At the end of the day when I hand over an image, I like knowing exactly what it looks like—that it’s my image, my art.

Seckler: Do you think photographers should be concerned if they only want to shoot stills?

Gordaneer: I think the transition will be quick. I think there is always going to be room for print advertising. Art directors love that they can go out and concentrate on one image. I don’t think they are going to be pushing only for duel scenarios.

Seckler: What are you working on now?

Gordaneer: I am very excited about my upcoming charity project that I am working on for the people of Uganda. We are shooting a documentary and I am going to teach photography to underprivileged kids for a week. Afterward, we are going to have a show and hopefully auction off the images. All the kids are going to take shots and we are going to do a combined show with them and then bring it back to Toronto. Hopefully we will do it in New York and London as well. I’m hopeful that it will get some people to give to Ugandan charities. After the wars there, millions of people were displaced. People lost their homes and were living in internment camps. Now they have to rebuild everything.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

Photographer Vincent Laforet must have a very proud mother. At the age of thirty-four he has already accumulated a list of accomplishments that many iconic photographers could only dream of. Win a Pulitzer Prize—check.  Staff photographer at the New York Times—check. First-ever national contract photographer at the New York Times—check. Named Photographer of the Year by the NPPA (twice!)—check. Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Photography by American Photo Magazine—check. Won more industry awards and honors then he can even remember—check.

It’s not just the laundry list of awards that sets Laforet apart though; it’s his steady and unique growth as a photographer. From shooting weddings at eighteen to the NBA finals in college to his job at the Times and now his much publicized move to commercial photography and motion work it’s been a long and fruitful evolution.

In our interview Laforet starts off with detailed stories of how he created two famous aerial photographs of New York City. Next we learn about his progression from photojournalist to commercial image-maker. The second half of our interview focuses on the incredible success of Laforet’s short Reverie and how that changed the industry and thrust him into the world of motion. We conclude with detailed predictions for the still and motion industries and advice for photographers who want to build a reel.

Seckler: We have two images we’re going to discuss, both aerial shots over New York City. Let’s start out discussing the 360˚ shot over the Empire State Building.

Laforet: A good example of how my career evolved is with aerial photography. That never happened on purpose; I had a background in sports photography. I was used to shooting with very long lenses and being able to capture the moment on the first try—you don’t get to re-shoot a game; it happens once.

When I was first up in a helicopter, I shot with a 500mm lens, which is unusual. It’s why my aerial shots stand out. I shoot with extremely long lenses from high altitudes. I did not decide that factor; it was my background as a sports photographer and my comfort with long lenses.

The 360˚ aerial shot over New York City was made with a custom 7.5mm lens. The idea behind it was to shoot straight down on the city and encompass as much of it’s environment as I could. I mounted the Canon 1DS Mark III [set to f/3.5 at 800 ISO at 1/250th of a second] at the end of a monopod, because if you’re shooting straight down from a helicopter, it means the helicopter is banking at 90˚—which is very dangerous. It might be the last thing you shoot.

The safe way to do it is to shoot down from your seat, but with an ultra wide-angle lens, you’re going to get not only your feet, but also the landing skids of the helicopter. So I lowered a monopod with the camera and connected the Ethernet cable to my laptop so I could see what I was shooting as I shot it, and I fired it with a pocket wizard. That led to a unique image of the city just after sunset that showed the Empire State Building in its dead center.

Believe it or not, I shot that image as we flew by the building. You can’t hover above it; it’s too dangerous. We flew by at 50 mph and we were so close to the antenna that I actually raised my feet, just out of reflex.

Seckler: Let’s discuss the second aerial shot, your iconic image of an ice skating rink in Central Park.

Laforet: When I was shooting for the New York Times, I would always reserve the last five to ten minutes of any flight because flying time is very expensive. After I shot my assignments, I asked the pilot to do a quick detour through Central Park. It was a winter afternoon and the sun was very low on the horizon, casting these beautiful shadows—from the air you don’t see people, you see shadows.

As I mentioned, you can’t shoot straight down from the helicopter, so I had the pilot do very tight turns, quick circles above the skating rink. We did that for three, four, maybe five minutes, and I knew I had the photo at the moment that center skater did a pirouette. I’ve always loved how there is a family of three in the top left holding hands and a family of three in the bottom right. The beauty of that symmetry is that it’s a real image, a real moment—it’s not Photoshop. Reality is what photojournalists’ love, when chaos becomes beauty.

The other reality is that I had no feeling in my hands when I shot that photo because it was so cold. At every turn the wind hit my eyes, and at a certain point, they filled with tears. That’s when you love that you have auto focus because you can see that blurry image of the center skater coming together, but you’ve got tears flowing out of your eyes, and in my case, onto my glasses, where they’re freezing. Meanwhile, the wind is blowing at 120 mph. You just pray that you’ll get that exact moment framed correctly.

Seckler: What sparked your interest in photography?

Laforet: My father was a photographer in Paris. He worked at Gamma Press Agency where he shot everything from wars to movie sets. When I was 15 I asked him to quickly teach me how to use a camera, and he lent me his camera body, which was a Nikon F3 with a 50mm lens. He gave me a few roles of film and I shot my first images. I was immediately hooked with the process. Soon I was running around New York shooting street photography.

Seckler: Did you eventually go to school for photography?

Laforet: No, I learned on the job. I shot Bat Mitzvahs, weddings. At 18, I started working for agencies and magazines and I then I entered Northwestern University where I studied journalism. During the summers I got internships at the Los Angeles Times, in its Washington DC office, where I covered the White House, Capital Hill, and at the Miami Herald, where I got my feet wet in terms of newspaper photography. Internships remain among the best ways to develop a portfolio and make connections that will help you get a job after college.

Before I graduated from Northwestern, I worked for a wire service. I basically shot Michael Jordan in the NBA Finals while I was a junior in college. I missed my midterms and finals to cover the NBA, and I almost got kicked out of school.

After I graduated, I freelanced for a year. Eventually I went to work for a company called All Sport, shooting nothing but sports photography for two years. I traveled 300 days a year. I covered the Super Bowl, Rose Bowl, World Series, All-Star games, you name it. Eventually there was a job opening in the New York Times website. I worked there for six months. Having not learned my lesson about not working seven days a week, I worked four days a week on the website and three days a week for the newspaper as a freelancer, and low and behold, six months later I was hired for the New York Times as staff photographer.

Seckler: You were a staff photographer for the New York Times for several years and you created a fantastic body of work during that period but you recently got involved with commercial photography. Tell me about that transition.

Laforet: My career with the New York Times was one of the best positions you can get. It was a fantastic experience. But I was shooting only for the newspaper and wasn’t allowed to shoot for myself because there was a very strict conflict of interest policy. At one point, Moby contacted me to shoot his concert from the air and I had to turn him down, which killed me. That opportunity and a bunch of others passed me by before I realized that I needed to spread my wings and not be limited only to newspaper photography.

In 2003, I negotiated a contract with the New York Times that enabled me to continue working for them and to also work for other people, which led to commercial work. The point was simply to try other stuff. I’d seen these beautiful commercial productions and I thought I might pull that off someday.

Seckler: You’re represented by Stockland Martel, one of the most well respected rep agencies for commercial photographers. Tell me about that relationship and how you became a part of their roster.

Laforet: My agents Bill Stockland and Maureen Martel are two of the best people in the business. It’s a fantastic agency because they treat you like a human being. They actually want you to grow as a photographer. They took a big risk when they signed me. At the time, I had only 15 years of experience as an editorial photographer without a single piece of commercial work in my book. I suppose they signed me because I stand out. I don’t do the traditional portrait, but if you want an unusual angle overhead, or a shot that is very technical, that tends to be the category where I fall.

Seckler: How much of your current work is commercial vs. editorial vs. motion?

Laforet: It’s a third commercial photography, a third commercial photography plus video, and a third just video. My editorial work has slowed. I shot two editorial assignments in the past year and a half, one was Obama’s inauguration for Time magazine, and the other was Michael Jackson’s funeral from a helicopter.

Seckler: Is that because you’ve been too busy with commercial work?

Laforet: What I do tends to be expensive—renting a helicopter is expensive, or the production I get involved with is expensive. And given what’s happened to the editorial market in the past year and a half with the economy, magazines just can’t afford it. I have, in effect, priced myself out a little bit in doing some of these editorial assignments. Having done only two editorials in the past year is not my choosing; it’s more what has happened to the editorial market.

Seckler: Let’s discuss your now famous move into motion using HD-DSLR cameras.

Laforet: Right after I got back from the Olympics in Beijing, I went to have a meeting with a friend of mine at Canon. On the day I showed up for our lunch meeting I saw these white boxes coming in, which were the prototypes of the Canon EOS 5D MKII. I just begged and begged to get one weekend alone with that camera. They said no six times and on the seventh time they finally said “Borrow the camera for the weekend and then give us some feedback.” They weren’t expecting me to shoot anything, but I was so excited I called my wife who works with me, and I asked her to call modelling agencies and book the helicopter, and the next thing we knew we were shooting the very next night with a crew of three people. We shot the first HD SLR video ever that showed off the full frame sensor and I think it took the world by storm because of the brilliant technology. The video was viewed more than a million times the first week, and the next thing you know I was being invited to speak at Disney and DreamWorks, and I was showing my work on projection screens at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. It was a wonderful opportunity.

Seckler: Did that catapult you onto the film/video scene?

Laforet: Yes. I could not have hired a PR agency to do what “Reverie” did for me. I could have spent millions of dollars and it wouldn’t have gotten the kind of notice that the video did. I attribute my success to the technology itself and the luck and timing to be the first one to use the camera. I was simply asked to give Canon feedback, but I chose to shoot something that was relatively good looking and then blog about it. There was an explosion on the blog. Never before in history has someone been able to shoot something over the weekend, post it on his or her blog for free, and have a few million people see it immediately.

Seckler: How has that notoriety translated into your work? Has all of that attention gotten you jobs?

Laforet: It has definitely resulted in more work; I’ve never been this busy. I’ve been booked every day for the first five months of this year. Initially it was a hassle; I received close to 100,000 e-mails the first year. I missed so many jobs as a result because I couldn’t keep up with the demand.There was also a fan following, which I never wanted. I hated blogs initially—I thought they were the worst self-promotional things. And then I read some blogs by people like photo editor Rob Haggart and photographer Chase Jarvis, and found them interesting. That led me to start my own blog during the Beijing Olympics. I already had a readership, close to 20,000 people a day. At the same time I didn’t want to become a talking head for companies or products. I want to be an artist and a producer. It’s hard to find that balance, but writing a blog is interesting. It enables me to stay on the cutting edge of technology—I get to test out a lot of the newest toys before other people.

Seckler: What is it about the HD-DSLRs that has you so captivated?

Laforet: I find two things about the cameras most appealing—their affordability and amazing sensitivity to light. You can use the lenses and equipment you already have; that’s how I shot “Reverie”. I didn’t have cinema equipment. I just shot with what I had on hand and the results are amazing. There are few cameras out there that can compete with it, in terms of sensor size. And as you know, the larger the sensor, the less depth of field, so it gives you a very unique look.I think it’s the best tool for filmmakers. You no longer need $250,000 to get a Panavision camera, lighting, dollies, and a twenty person crew. All you need is the vision. For the first time new filmmakers have the tools to produce nearly the same quality as professionals.The second thing that appeals to me is the camera’s sensitivity to light. It performs in low light like nothing else. The sensor sees more then my naked eye can see at times. Its low-light capacity enables you to shoot the average scene in available light.

Seckler: What does that mean for the film industry?

Laforet: HD-DSLR cameras are already being used to make dozens of commercials. There’s two or three feature films being shot with them, and a lot of shots in Iron Man and other big movies are being shot with them.

Seckler: This movement seems like when digital first came out for still cameras. Everybody was saying that people would be able to shoot for almost nothing, the competition would become intense, prices would drop, and the industry would start to collapse. Are people saying the same thing about HD-DSLR cameras affect on the motion industry?

Laforet: Some of it happened. Anyone can buy a Canon Rebel and shoot some good-looking stuff. But it does not replace the need for talent. In the end, the reason I am still excited about these tools is that they remove the technical limitations that we as professionals love because they keep us employed. But they also remove barriers because they enable truly talented people to rise to the top. And what I learned as a photojournalist working for the New York Times is that people gravitate toward quality. They gravitate toward good ideas and good execution, not glitz.The same is true for movie making. People still gravitate toward great stories and these tools enable you to focus more on storytelling as a filmmaker, and less on technique. I don’t think it’s going to affect the high-end filmmaking industry as much as it will affect the middle to low end. The high end is always going to shoot on Panavision. It’s more the indie films that will benefit from making production less expensive.In terms of equipment, I’d be nervous if I were an equipment rental company, or a lighting company, but as far as the people are concerned, you still need the crew. People are squeezing budgets because of the economy, regardless of what we want. These tools just enable us to meet that demand and stay in business. I do see it heavily affecting people in the print industry, however.

Newspapers and magazines are on their last legs. They need to create moving content to stay in business. I think editorial photographers are going to be asked to shoot video. It’s not what the editorial people want, it’s what the advertisers want. They want moving content that gets attention. More and more photographers will be asked to shoot video along with stills, and it’s going to be a huge learning curve for people.

Seckler: In your opinion, where is still photography going to be in the next few years?

Laforet: Regardless of video, the future is pretty bleak for still photography. Day rates for magazine shoots have not increased since 1980, despite inflation and the rising cost of gear. Ad revenue is down, assignment days are down, and the competition to get jobs is insane.

More and more, commercial clients want to see video. One industry insider said 80 percent of requests come for reels along with portfolios. Clients want to see both video and stills—they want to get both from one person so they get a unified vision of their product.

Seckler: Where will still photography be in 20 years? Will there always going to be a place for the still image?

Laforet: There will always be a place for the still image; however, it is going to be much more of a boutique thing. I think you will have the world’s leading photographers who are readily published on the web and have gallery shows. I don’t think you’re going to have 250,000 photographers in 15 years like we do now.

Seckler: Tell me about the unique video contest that you’re running?

Laforet: The “Beyond the Still” Photo Contest will be running until this summer. I was given a still image to interpret in a two- to three-minute short film, and at the end of my film, I end on a still image. Everyone who enters the contest in the second chapter has to interpret my image into their own unique two- to three-minute film, and then end on a still image, and so on. At the end of seven chapters, we will hopefully have a very interesting series of short films that are interconnected by a still image from chapter to chapter. I’m looking forward to the result. It’s a unique look into the social aspects of filmmaking.

Seckler: Do you have any advice for still photographers who want to build a reel?

Laforet: Take it one a step at a time. Study the market. There are so many disciplines of photography: stock, commercial, editorial, fashion. The same is true about video or film. Find out what entices you. Go get an HD-DSLR and use your existing lenses and play around. Do a quick edit, or find a friend who’s an editor to help you see what you’re good at—and what you’re not. The cost is so much less compared to what it used to be. Don’t over-think it.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

Clients ranging from McDonalds to Rolling Stone seek out Chicago based photographer Saverio Truglia for his distinctive brand of ironic and often dark sense of humour. His signature images include a cow standing in a grocery store aisle stocked with ground beef and an open casket funeral displaying only the fashionable shoes of the deceased. Truglia’s imaginative humour along with a penchant for creative problem solving have been fruitful, winning him many awards and a long list of repeat clients.

His problem solving skills are particularly apparent in our featured image of an innocent young girl lying in her bedroom next to an ominous looking snake. The image, a self-promotional work created for marketing purposes, is deceiving. It appears to be a well-executed location shoot but was actually shot in Truglia’s studio following a week of production. One could imagine doing this for a deep-pocketed commercial client but Truglia pulled it off on a shoestring budget of only $1500.

In our interview Truglia starts out by revealing all the details of creating the featured image; covering everything from production to lighting. We then learn all about his marketing strategies, his creative process and his advice for young photographers.

Seckler: Please explain how you came up with the idea for our featured image – your self-assigned image titled Yellow Bird and the Snake?

Truglia: I had been working on a series of pictures about kids. I wanted to make a picture about a young girl on the verge of adolescence and toying with something dangerous. I had an idea of a girl on the floor of a bedroom with a snake. The inspiration for the details came from different places. I was inspired by the idea of recreating a tiny kid’s room in an attic with slanted walls. The photo was taken on a set that I designed and built.

Seckler: This image involves many expensive elements: custom-built set, set design, exotic wildlife, talent, etc. and you were paying for it all out-of-pocket. How did you bring this together on a limited budget?

Truglia: I started by painting with a really big brush, trying to put the bigger pieces together, like the set and talent. I’ll often look for talent on Flickr by searching with keywords to get ideas. I found a series of self-portraits of a young girl who photographed herself in abandoned spaces like old warehouses and broken down apartments, looking innocent and all sprawled out on the floor. I sent the images to Angela Finney, a prop and wardrobe stylist I work with in Chicago. I explained that they represented the kind of spaces I wanted to recreate, especially the lighting, and we discussed it. Meanwhile, I kept going back to the girl’s Flickr page, thinking, ‘Wow, photographing this girl would be great. She’s probably in her early twenties, but she looks like she’s twelve, and I can direct her into something that’s a little sexual without it being totally inappropriate.’ I learned that she lived in Chicago and wrote to ask if she would consider being in my photo. She said she’d do it.

The set was built in my own studio. I made some drawings for my set builder. He combined those ideas with wall pieces that I owned and wall pieces that he fabricated to make the diagonals. It was assembled in one day. Angela, my stylist, brought a window that she had owned and we added it. Styling the set took three days. We thought about who the girl was and what her hobbies were, how old she was, what time of day it was, and the overall color pallet.

[Next] I needed a snake, so I found the Chicago Herpetological Society, which is a group that handles reptiles. The next day I got an email that included seven or eight photos of snakes. I requested several, a yellow albino snake and two different Pythons. I didn’t know how the girl was going to deal with the snakes. I had told her she was going to be photographed with a snake, but I didn’t provide details. Fortunately, she was comfortable.

Seckler: Tell me about the lighting…

Truglia: My plan was to make a warm sunlit room, so I chose to use as few lights as possible.  When you’re shooting in the sun there’s only one sun. You often don’t need more than one light. I used a pair of Speedotron 2400 Ws packs powering a quad tube head with an 11” reflector and a layer of ½ Atlantic frost, set 11’ feet from the subject and 11’ high. This served as my sun.  I pointed it through the window to cast a patch of light on the floor and project natural shadows around the room. We used several 4’ x 8’ white bounce cards off set to reflect this light back onto set and open the shadows as a small room would.  The only other lights were one coming from camera right bouncing into a white v-flat.  This light was another Speedotron 2400 Ws pack and a single 202 VF head and standard 7” reflector. A Speedotron 1200 pack with a 20” x 24” Photoflex soft box was outside the window illuminating the fake tree and a small white flat. There was a tiny Morris slave light gelled pink in the clip lamp you see above the aquarium illuminating the alligator. This was the little guy’s “heat lamp”.

The exposures were 1/125 @ f8 on a Canon 1Ds Mark III using a Canon EF35mm f 1.4L USM lens. The only significant plate I used was a nice bright patch of sunlight from a clean plate exposed a stop brighter than my main plate.  Retouching was relatively simple and consisted of manipulating color and I did it myself. Since we built the set so specifically there was nothing I wanted to dramatically alter in post.

I shot 300 or 400 frames [during the shoot]. The snake kept changing positions. Eventually it stayed still and I could reposition it safely. Snakes are like lumps of meat—you can pose them however you want.

Seckler: In the end how much did this all cost?

Truglia: [The budget for this shoot] was about $1,500, which included building the set, paying a donation to the Chicago Herpetological Society, buying lunch, plus a little honorarium I gave to the talent It takes a lot of begging, borrowing and stealing to bring everything together.

Seckler: Was the photo meant to be self-promotional or something that you wanted to do creatively?

Truglia: It was self-promotional. Usually, even if I do something great for a client, there is always a lot of lag time before I can use it. When I take photographs, I like to think that I set out to make pictures that haven’t been made before, which is the ongoing exercise. I wanted to recreate, in a technical sense, a simple lighting situation that wasn’t going to hem me in creatively.

I also think about what I’m telling the market. What do my images reveal about me as a photographer? In this case, I wanted to make a picture that didn’t look like the lighting was laboured; I didn’t want it to look artificial. I guess it’s a response to a lot of the work I see in the world—I unconsciously made a decision to go against that.

Seckler: You created this self-promotional image been successful for you?

Truglia: I shot it in the spring of 2009 and used it in a promotional poster. It has become one of the images to which people, even non-professionals, most refer. I think something about animals and children resonates with most people.

Seckler: Where do you market your work?

Truglia: Even when I’m not shooting there’s always some promotional effort going on in the background. It could in the places where I pay to advertise, such as At-Edge.com, workbook.com, and wonderfulmachine.com.

Seckler:  How valuable is that paid advertising for you?

Truglia: That’s the million-dollar question that I cannot answer. Art directors who want to work with you won’t tell you how they found you. If you’re chosen to work with somebody it’s probably because they saw your images or heard or read your name repeatedly—multiple references to you or your work that happened in unison. Maybe they’ve read your name in a blog or maybe they saw your image in Archive. Eventually those media references reach a critical mass. Getting hired is never from one reference. No one has ever told me they hired me because they saw my image in At-Edge. If a photographer is chosen because his or her work appeared in one place, art directors still won’t trust you. They need to see your work in lots of spaces.

Seckler: Why do you think that is?

Truglia: The market is saturated with talented photographers. Art directors want to work with people who are most committed to their craft. I don’t think that photographs occur to art directors any differently than Pepsi occurs to a consumer. Why do you think MacDonald’s needs to continue to advertise? They need to keep on advertising or their sales would drop off sharply. As a photographer, you have to be everywhere. Whenever possible, you have to be on art directors’ minds, which is probably the greatest challenge. There are just so many good photographers.

Seckler: What else do you do to promote your work, aside from advertising?

Truglia: There’s my website, which changes every couple of years. The website I’m currently using is two-years-old. It will be completely replaced by May 2010; I’m already working on a new one with a different design, look and feel from the current site.

I meet a lot of young photographers who are active in Chicago, including in the art and trade schools and the trade groups, like the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and the Advertising Photographers of America (APA). I always tell them this business is about photography. It’s about being an artist, but it’s a battle of perception—trying to win the battle of perception. There are a lot of talented photographers who go unnoticed because they didn’t win that battle of perception, which has everything to do with marketing—how your work shows up or how often it is seen. It has everything to do with your Facebook postings. You have to build your profile. We all have a public face that must be maintained.

Seckler: How do you use Facebook to market your work?

Truglia: Facebook is just a supplementary place for marketing. I use Facebook as a business tool. I communicate with friends, but I keep those conversations offline. If you read my wall posts, they all have something to do with my business. Sometimes I use Facebook more than I use my actual blog, which is yet another outlet for marketing, such as posting videos or behind-the-scenes photos.

Seckler: Do you do any other direct self-promotion?

Truglia: Books are still important, though I think they are less relevant today. I made five copies of my last book. For a short while there they were all circulating, but nowadays I can’t remember the last job I got where they called in my book. Repeat clients don’t need it. Book requests sometimes come from new clients who want to be involved in choosing a photographer.

Seckler: When did you notice that people stopped calling in your books?

Truglia: It stopped two years ago, shortly after I made some bound books. Now I don’t invest a lot of time and money into revamping bound books. I keep one book up to date; if I make a new picture I will print it and put it in there. Bound books are useful only for a limited time.

Seckler: What I love most about your photography are your clever, unique ideas. Can you describe your creative process?

Truglia: Usually, when I get the inclination to make an image for a personal project or a get a layout or concept from a creative, I try and disconnect my brain and my heart so for a moment so I am free. I push the concept as far as I can go with it—even into the realm of the absurd. I learned how valuable it is to push your ideas beyond practical reality so that when you come back and settle on something it’s already out of your safety zone. I consider where am I most comfortable making a picture, how comfortable I am while directing that talent, how am I explaining the concept to people. Some people don’t pitch risky ideas because they won’t actually go through with them. I push myself to the point where I am uncomfortable with the whole undertaking.

Seckler: A situation where you know you’re challenging yourself…

Truglia: Yes. I like to challenge myself. For example, I shot this cover of a magazine last week and I had to replicate a Playboy cover. In the end I wanted to create a picture of a pin-up girl holding a stack of books. It was a story about a librarian who collects Playboys. We were doing this conceptual picture of a bookish girl, which they ended up not using because the headline changed. But the situation put me in a place of discomfort—like the Snake picture was a little uncomfortable—because I didn’t know what the snake was going to do. For that reason it was like a logistical discomfort. I knew I had to give up some control and that’s when good stuff happens. I prefer situations where I can potentially lose control.

Seckler: How did you get started as a photographer? How did you break in?

Truglia: I went to college at Mass Art in Boston from 1990 to 1994 where I studied photography. I originally became interested in photography by an exhibit, Polaroid 20 x 24 Portraits. Up until that point I was a graphic design major. I immediately changed my major to photography. In 1995, I moved to Chicago because I had friends living here. I was 23, and I started working at an art gallery photographing art. Years later, I worked at another art gallery, a very blue chip gallery, where I photographed Picasso’s and such. That exposure launched my first business—photographing artists’ sculpture and paintings. Although I was earning money, the work was tedious.

I almost gave up photography completely until I reinvestigated what I was photographing in college. I had always made portraits, so I decided that’s what I wanted to do. I had been experimenting all along with a Polaroid. I always had a camera with me, but I never took it seriously. I threw together portfolios, made postcards and sent them out, and a couple of them hit. My career started in 1999 when I started doing editorial work. By 2004, I landed my first advertising job.

Seckler: What were those first four years like? I think people always wonder about those “in-between” years…

Truglia: Fortunately I didn’t assist anybody, because if had I, I’d probably would have given up on photography. I would have realized early on how hard the job was and would have been dissuaded from pursuing it. I had to figure out everything I needed to learn from first-hand experience. I spent a lot of time with Vanity Fair looking through the eyes of Annie Leibovitz, trying to figure out how she might have lit something.

Seckler: So you did a lot of self-teaching?

Truglia: I bought a digital camera and started using it exclusively. You can teach yourself much faster with a digital because you have an immediate response to your technique. Digital photography has made me a better photographer, because what used to be a risk—like moving a light somewhere or bouncing it off something—was no longer risky.

Seckler: You started out in fine arts and ended up doing largely commercial work. Are you still interested in fine art photography?

Truglia: I don’t participate in that world. If I make a picture for myself it’s always a picture that I think could hang in a gallery, like the picture of the snake. That’s the sort of image I would make if I were to remove the commercial aim from my work. That image interests me as an artist. My personal work would not be a radical departure from my commercial portfolio. I try and have my photography be all one thing, a reflection of who I am.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

For photographers who dream of shooting fun ad campaigns for international brands Mat Baker is surely a source of inspiration. In less than four years Baker made the move from shooting headshots of models in his native New Zealand to traveling around the world shooting campaigns for top ad agencies. In those few short years he’s shot dozens of campaigns and in the process has been showered with awards from Cannes, the Clio Awards, D&AD and The One Show to name a few.

Mat Baker is always picked to shoot the funny campaigns – from a construction worker wearing panties to a twenty-year-old computer sporting an old mannish looking toupee. The one thing that is never the same is his aesthetic. Instead of making his name with a specific vision or signature lighting or retouching technique, Baker has done so with a style that adapts to fit the concept.

How has Baker become so successful in such a short period of time? His humorous answer in our recent telephone interview “I like drinking beer and socializing” hints at an easy-going personality and savvy networking skills but there’s of course more to it then that. During our chat Baker discussed how he turned a very difficult location shoot into a campaign that ended up winning a Cannes Silver Lion. The description of shooting this commission, which is also our featured image, showcases Baker’s creative approach to image making and ability to improvise in what turned out to be a very tough situation.

Our interview begins on the creation of our featured image and continues on to cover many other interesting topics.

Seckler: Tell me about the ad campaign you shot for Science Diet and how you were awarded the job?

Baker: I had been shooting a lot of funny stuff, especially with dogs and cats, so we had done a couple of shoots beforehand and the agency had seen that work. I had photographed dogs from weird angles, so the agency initially came to me with the job because they wanted me to duplicate those ideas. I had to do some research to ensure that no one else had done anything too similar. The big thing was getting the right sized dogs to make the photos funny. We [also] thought if we used a really small dog and had this little tiny light beam and contrasted that with a much larger dog and a much bigger beam, that would make the photographs funnier.

Seckler: What was your technical approach to creating this image?

Baker: This was always going to be a component based shoot, its just one of those things when you shoot animals. You can get the best animal wrangler around, but animals will always be unpredictable. So then it comes down to timing, doggy treats and a fast camera. Deconstructing the ad we needed the scope and elements to push this image to be as funny as possible. Main dog image, mouth open, tail up, our vet, torchlight and main plate shot. The vet space that ended up being available wasn’t our first choice. We wanted something a lot bigger. But as soon as we saw this though, we thought, perfect…more intimate and less distraction to draw the viewer into the comedy of what was happening in the shot.

Seckler: Did you add props or change the location in any way?

Baker: No, I changed very little. The walls were quite clean and the x-ray machine and the background above the vet’s head were original. I did shoot a couple of extra components like the stuff on the right hand wall—just to add a little bit of interest to the shots—but that’s it. What you see was the exact layout of the room.

Seckler: Tell me about your approach to the lighting.

Baker: Lighting the shots was a challenge. I was aware that I had to show the torchlight shining through, so I knew that I had to darken the shot enough to do that without losing any other details. It was tricky. That’s among the reasons why the second location ended up being a better choice. I was actually crammed into a corner and slightly out the door, so I didn’t have the biggest amount of room to add lights. I had a couple of assistants holding lights up in the air. We bounced a lot of light off the ceiling and combined that with soft light from the outside and a little from off the roof. I wanted the environment to look institutional—to have that sort of floor lit look—you know, like when a vet examines a dog, with the x-rays and other machinery, there is always a very slight light coming from the ceiling. I just wanted to emit that familiar feeling.

Seckler: So what kind of equipment did you use and how did you put it all together?

Baker: When it came to the plate shots, we darkened the shot down to put emphasis on the light beam which was the most important element in the shot. For this I used three Broncolor Pulso Gs and two Broncolor A4 Grafits. I focused one light with a 10 degree honeycomb for the rear wall (I wanted to create the foundation for a vignette). For the vet and dog talent we used a 80 x 80 Pulsoflex EM softbox angled towards the ceiling. For the right wall we used a P70 with diffuser. I shot with a Hasselblad H2 with a Phase One P45+ Back with a 55 to 110mm zoom lens set at F8 @ 250th for the animals and F8 @ 15th for the plate shots.

Seckler: Given the tight space it seemed like a really tricky lighting situation…

Baker: It really was. I mean, obviously you want every single advertising job to look kick ass, and I think that’s among the coolest things about working in advertising: You get so much stuff thrown at you all the time. You need to be able to come up with solutions very quickly.

Seckler: Tell me about the flashlight source. Did you actually use a flashlight?

Baker: I totally used a flashlight. At the time, I was trying to quit smoking. I experimented with just shooting the light, but obviously you need another element to highlight—or make it more humorous—so I actually blew a little bit of cigarette smoke into the torch light. I shot those components and then tweaked them a little. Basically, I stayed true to the different light sources.

Seckler: Tell me more. There are obviously two separate beams of light…

Baker: Yes. I think I used three or four different-sized torches with different-sized beams. Through a process of elimination, I went through every different-sized torch and matched each up to the size of each dog.

Seckler: How many components are in this shot?

Baker: I would say five or six—the vet, the room, the dog, its jaw, and the beam.

Seckler: Tell me about the retouching.

Baker: It was a straightforward retouch, just adding the components together and the look that we wanted. We wanted it to look quite plain and gritty. I basically used the film grain filter and added a grey, soft light blend mode so you can control the opacity of the grain to the image. It was actually the first time I actually added grain to a shot because I largely prefer my images to be clean.

Seckler: In an earlier conversation you mentioned your younger brother does most of your retouching right? How did you begin working together?

Baker: He retouches about 90 percent of my shots. Basically, Karl, who at 28 is six years younger than me, has always been interested in photography. Working together happened organically because we love hanging out with each other. He was always into computers, and at the time I think he was going to get into graphic design. And at that early stage, I was still shooting film. As I moved into digital photography, our collaboration was gradual. Everything fell into place quite beautifully; it’s been five years now.

Seckler: Where are you based?

Baker: We are based in New Zealand, but we do 80 percent of our work offshore. We do a lot of traveling, about 48 flights a year; we are on an airplane all the time. We didn’t envision it was going to be this way when we started. We used to do a job in Sydney every now and then, but after winning a few big awards, it has gone pretty ballistic. It’s been pretty cool.

Seckler: Do you travel mostly in Australia or do you go other areas of the world?

Baker: We just came back from shooting for Coca Cola in Hong Kong and just before that we did another job in Melbourne and Sydney. We travel all around Australia and Asia. We did a job in Shanghai about six months ago. And we shot the Singapore Bank campaign throughout Singapore and Thailand for two weeks, which was amazing. We are focused more towards Asia right now, but we do want to work in Europe and the United States as well.

Seckler: How do you view the different markets? For example do agencies in Asia like a certain style, or a certain approach or sensibility more than your clients in Australia or in New Zealand?

Baker: I think there is quite a big difference in the Australian and New Zealand markets. You can really push the humour; you can push your ideas really far. Australian and New Zealand clients also seem to be more willing to take risks and that’s what I love about them. We dig doing funny stuff; we really like shooting humour, so the further I can push it the better. But there are limitations, especially in China because it’s Communist. You’ve got to be careful.

Seckler: Are there specific cultural shifts that influence your methods of working? Can you give me an example of how an Australian client has let you push something further.

Baker: We did a job for Vespa, which is a good example. The job was for the new GT 300 CC, which is the first time Vespa had actually put out an engine of that power. So the idea was to shoot really obese people, just with a Vespa helmet to their right, no bike, nothing—just the logo, the all-new powerful 300 GTS Vespa. So, it’s pretty borderline, and when it came to retouching, we actually made the people sort of larger than they were initially, and they were pretty large initially, so it was a case of the bigger we make them the funnier they’ll be. The other thing is that the clients who we shoot for in Asia are more commercial; they cater to a wider audience so we need to be more careful about where we take an idea there. And personally I am obviously careful about where I try to push my ideas, so I try to take what I can from facial expressions and body humour—as opposed to other outside influences; I think that’s the main difference.

Seckler: You were saying that most of the work that has taken you overseas has been the result of winning many awards recently, is that right?

Baker: Winning the awards definitely accelerated how much work we get, especially through word of mouth. The first year we shot for five clients. We were very lucky that we got involved with amazing creatives with really amazing ideas.

Seckler: What is your photographic background?

Baker: My background was fashion. I shot as a fashion photographer for a number of years and I was bored with fashion because it restricted what I could shoot. It was very commercial in New Zealand. There were fashion magazines, but on the whole, to earn money in New Zealand, you have to shoot commercially. I started shooting fashion when I was about twenty, but even before that I was a press photographer. I was a newspaper photographer from about eighteen to twenty one. And then from twenty-one I got into fashion and then it was roughly around age 30 when I started getting into advertising.

Seckler: How did you start as a press photographer and how did that that career lead you to fashion?

Baker: I freelanced with different newspapers and it got to a point where I was shooting mostly car crashes and house fires, mostly news stuff. And I was getting a little bit down about it, because there is more to life than just seeing ugly stuff, so I wanted to photograph stuff that was more upbeat. After awhile I met a girl through a mutual friend whose mother was a fashion designer in New Zealand. The girl, who was also a photographer, became my girlfriend for four or five years and she had a massive impact on my photography. We went to fashion shows and shot backstage, met models, and that is how I fell into the fashion thing. I found work shooting head shots for local modelling agencies. After I shot like 100 girls—basically all the girls that they had—I started showing my book around to magazines and ended up getting editorial work.

Seckler: Do you consider yourself mainly an advertising photographer, or do you still do editorial work or fine art photography?

Baker: I do now, but a year and a half ago I would have said, “Yeah, I am just an advertising photographer.” At that time I was so prolific. I was shooting campaigns all the time that I actually didn’t have any time to shoot personal stuff. I was shooting four times a week at one stage, non-stop, then we would retouch images in the evenings. We were working twelve to fourteen hour days for a long time. But I missed shooting personal stuff. When I shot in Shanghai in the middle of last year it was the first time I cracked out my camera and basically walked around and shot. Since then I have done a nude study. I basically work on about seven or eight different personal projects in between conventional jobs. Working on personal images has revitalized my passion for wanting to experiment and push my craft as far as I can go.

Seckler: You’ve won so many awards recently, how do you get yourself involved in so many award-winning projects?

Baker: I like drinking beer and socializing. Inevitably, you have a few beers with creative people and then you start to joke around and say this could be funny or that could be funny and you go on from there. I think that it’s important to just have fun and be light hearted, to not take life too seriously. If you begin to take everything too seriously, it almost stops that organic flow of the humour you want to achieve. It’s tricky.

Seckler: You mentioned traveling dozens of times a year, what’s it like being away from your family and trying to juggle that with your busy career?

Baker: It’s pretty hard. My son is a year and a half and my daughter is four. We use Skype to stay in touch, but it’s hard, especially because I am often traveling farther away for longer periods. The Singapore bank job took about three weeks; it was a really big job. During that time my son started saying “daddy,” so I missed out on a few things. I love what I do, but I have become more selective about what jobs I take. It’s one of those situations where you think, ‘I don’t want this to end. This is awesome, it’s like a dream.’ I get to travel to amazing places, but I think there is a point where you can burn yourself out. I’ve been shooting so much over the last three to four years; I’ve just become more selective about what I shoot.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

In the world of celebrity portraiture photography, where looking like plastic perfection has become the norm, photographer Chris Buck stands a world apart. Complicated lighting and retouching aren’t the tools of his trade, it’s the grey matter between his ears.

If you aren’t already familiar with the name, try looking through many major magazines, he seems to be everywhere these days. GQ, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine are but a few of his major editorial clients and in 2007 he was the first recipient of the Arnold Newman Portrait Prize.

Buck’s clever and often humorous approach to portraiture puts subjects in situations that are at once entertaining and revealing.  Concepts that oscillate between the tame – Tina Fey balancing on a stool – to mischievous – Billy Bob Thornton urinating on a photo set. Whatever it may be, there is always a sense of sophisticated wit in Buck’s imagery. His style is a breath of fresh air; one that would be nice to see more of in the genre.

I interviewed Buck a few months ago at his apartment in New York. Our conversation first focused on our featured image: Buck’s portrait of the Vice Magazine founders and editors he shot for Wired Magazine (check out the behind-the-scenes video). We then discussed a variety of other interesting topics: how he generates ideas, the psychology behind his photography, dealing with celebrities and their publicists and a few tips for budding photographers.

Seckler: Tell me about the concept for our featured image, your portrait of the Vice Magazine founders and editors you shot for Wired Magazine (above).

Buck: I write notes before any shoot. Sometimes ideas are connected to specific shoots. Others are ideas for photographs that I didn’t shoot, but that I am still interested in shooting. First I decide what I would I do with my subjects if I could do anything. A lot of those ideas are extreme. Most are visual and straightforward, but some are ridiculous. I have learned through experience to prepare a variety of ideas for every shoot, especially one that has the potential to be outrageous. You never know how things are going to go. I could be half way through a shoot and realize that my subject is willing to do anything. I try to be prepared.

Seckler: Let’s talk about the situation during the shoot. Which ideas worked and which didn’t?

Buck: The assignment was for Wired magazine, but I took the shoot because it was the Vice guys [Eddy Moretti, Shane Smith, and Suroosh Alvi]. I love Vice magazine; I love their attitude. I thought it would be fun to see if I could do something genuinely interesting and surprising, but when I talked to their PR people, they wouldn’t go for most of what I’d had in mind.

Seckler: What were the ideas they rejected?

Buck: I wanted one person to drop his pants in public while holding a video camera or all three men to pose nude while holding various pieces of meat in front of their bits [private parts]. Another idea was to pose them behind a wall with three glory holes and each man’s penis poking through each hole, which would have been awesome.

Seckler: What did they approve?

Buck: We shot with a baby. It was very straightforward. The men were photographed as a parent’s hand reached for the baby that one man on the end kissed. Basically, I thought, how can they say no to kissing a baby?

Seckler: Did you already have the baby on set?

Buck: Yes, they had agreed to it. We did four different shots. One was in the office in Greenpoint [Brooklyn]. The second was with the baby, which took the most time. We did another in a Chinese restaurant where the men are holding an actual MK-47 that we rented.

Seckler: Did you do all the prep work yourself or did you have a producer?

Buck: For magazine shoots, I generally do all the prep. Very few magazines will pay for a producer or a prop stylist.

Seckler: Tell me about the technical process.

Buck: I set up a backdrop so I could see part of the space, but much of it was blocked. Beautiful light was coming in through a skylight and I realized that I had to move the strobe because the baby was moving, as babies will, and that was blurring the shot. So, I moved the strobe and stopped shooting for 20 minutes. If you watch the video you will see that it’s inter cut between the shots with strobe and the shots with available light.

Seckler: So you first shot using only ambient light and then you brought in strobes?

Buck: Yeah, we brought in three Profoto 7A packs and three heads.

Seckler: To replicate that image?

Buck: Yes, we had one strobe over the camera that acted just as fill light. We had one strobe bouncing off the floor, like a soft box bounce or ambient light. And then we put one strobe behind the backdrop where the skylight was to reproduce a bit of a glow on the backdrop—a kind of flare—and we reproduced that.

Seckler: Why did you decide to reproduce ambient light?

Buck: I wouldn’t normally bounce light off a floor, but it looked good. I know my strobe is going to give me something I like if it looks good in the natural light. As a photographer you are influenced by the moment as much as you are interpreting any broader vision. I knew that the light would look good on film.

Seckler: And did you shoot film? What camera did you use?

Buck: I used Kodak Portrait NC 120 size film in a Mamia RZ 67. The film is 400 ISO, but I shot it at 200 ISO. I will use available light whenever I can. I’m not anti-technical, but I am not that interested in technique. I am interested only in how the picture looks. Knowing technical stuff is important. A good idea isn’t good enough. It must be implemented so the viewer can see what you want him or her to see.

Seckler: How did you first get involved with photography?

Buck: I studied photography in college, but I was more interested in music at that time, so I worked at a music paper as an editor and photographer. Before my final year of school I got serious; I decided to put everything aside and focus only on photography. Because I was already shooting for a publication during college, it became the road I took as an editorial photographer.

Seckler: So you got a few editorial jobs while you were still in college?

Buck: I was a photo editor for a music paper for a year and a half and I shot a lot of photographs for it. Most of the assignments were terrible. My execution wasn’t always bad; often it was because I was just starting out. Most of the better pictures I shot were self-assigned; I often photographed musicians who were coming through Toronto.

Once I finished school, I asked my professor if I should assist. He said, ‘No, that would be a step backwards. You are already shooting; you are already being published. Why you would work for someone else when you’re already working yourself?’ It was great advice. I never had to make the difficult transition from assistant to photographer, which I understand is tough financially and psychologically. However, I can see the value of assisting experienced photographers—it did take me longer to learn technique. It took me 12 to 15 years to learn how to light any situation well.

On the upside, I was building professional chops early in my career. Even when I was getting my first ad jobs, I had so much experience that I wasn’t intimidated by big budgets. I have 20 years of shooting experience going back to the 1980s.

I see both my assistants making the transition to being photographers, so you can learn from assisting and make useful contacts. Most people never use those contacts. If you assist more than two or three years, you probably don’t have what it takes to use those contacts. Most people who have assisted me haven’t asked me for contacts.

Seckler: Really? That’s interesting.

Buck: The people who typically ask for contacts are random people or interns who get serious about shooting. People who assist don’t realize that it often takes years to get regular work. Also, you’ll want to shoot for a couple of years for the experience. That is another two years. If you are really organized, you might work another year to transition from assisting to shooting. That’s a minimum of four years. For some people, the transition takes longer. Transitioning into shooting in your early thirties is much harder.

Seckler: What do you recommend for someone who is just finishing college?

Buck: I think that interning is far more effective than assisting. You can get many of the same experiences. Being an intern is very modest work, but if you are helping someone who is generous, you can ask questions and show that person your work. You can also take assignments; I give assignments to my interns.

Seckler: What do you mean?

Buck: I look at their work and give them tough assignments that challenge their abilities. If you are an intern for one year—with two different people for two or three months each—you can get as much experience as you would assisting over several years in a fraction of that time.

Seckler: Among the reasons why you’re a great photographer are your ideas. Tell me about your creative process.

Buck: My ideas usually come from discussions with clients. What is the angle of the article? What is the client promoting? I research; I really throw myself into it. I go and scout locations. Today I went to Martha Stewart’s studio to see the physical location. That does two things: First, I actually get to see where I’m shooting, and two, it immerses me in the shoot. After I left her studio I immediately developed ideas. I also research the person’s life and interests so when I am on set I can say, ‘Hey I read that you are interested in such and such…’ and even having that kind of banter is helpful. It may not affect an individual picture, but it might positively affect the relationship and they might just be more giving during the shoot.

Seckler: What research had you done for the Vice shoot?

Buck: I read a lot of interviews. Since Vice is centered on the idea of political incorrectness, a lot of my ideas came from that mindset, too. In a way, I knew they wouldn’t go for the more outrageous ideas because the point of the article was that the founders of the magazine are changing their image and being taken more seriously. I did first go by their offices to look around. In general, I like to come up with ideas that go against the grain, ideas that piss people off.

Seckler: Do you mean your audience, the publicist, or the subject?

Buck: I mean everyone. I mean whatever I can get away with. Even using the baby, for example. The baby was cute and I knew there were dangers in that because Wired might say, ‘We’re not shooting with a baby. This is Wired magazine, and we don’t do babies.’ I knew they might reject it. But I also knew that if I did it right, if I did it dry enough, it may be really interesting. I knew that the transgressive, and even sinister, Vice persona would come through if I just let them the three of them look serious and have the baby look almost actively cute.  And the baby’s expression worked out great because he looks so cute and googly eyed.

Seckler: What is your motivation for being provocative?

Buck: I have respect for the people I photograph. I think I successfully strike a balance between reflecting who the person is exactly and my own ideas about life. It’s an exercise in subtly and sophistication. It’s like my photo of Gary Oldman with red all over his face. It looks like he ate a person; it’s cannibalistic, but it is actually from him sticking his face in a pie. It was shot very cleanly. He’s not making a crazy face—it’s a straightforward expression—but it looks violent at the same time. That image is a perfect example of what I’m trying to do in my work. I love sexual imagery, too. I like exploring ideas about violence, but it’s very difficult to get those ideas into a photograph and have it look smart and sophisticated at the same time.

Seckler: What are you trying to tell people in your work?

Buck: I am an individualist. When I first started out, I ignored publicists and did whatever I wanted. That got me in trouble, so now I am respectful to publicists; I make them part of the process. On the surface I am much more agreeable, but I still like to go against the grain. I control things in small ways. I influence the current of ideas, which sometimes leads to sexual or violent references that I would rather explore in my work then in my life.

Seckler: How do you build relationships with your subjects?

Buck: Pete Weintz from the band Fallout Boy said that I knew more about him then half the people who have interviewed him. When I photographed the band Interpol, they said that I knew their names better then most people at their record company. And I think people respond to that respect. Pete Weintz got naked for me because I made him comfortable. He dropped his inhibitions.

Seckler: How do you relate to your subjects? Do you try one idea first and then push the envelope a bit more?

Buck: I am very careful about how I roll out ideas. Sometimes I share them, or if it just involves a simple prop, I will bring it along and spring it on everyone. I am friendly, but careful about how much I interact with people.

Essentially, I am a director. In a way, a portrait with a celebrity is like a medium-level director dealing with a huge star. Even though the director is running the ship creatively, if the celebrity is a bigger star then he or she can control what happens. As the director, I often photograph people who have much more power then I do. They can influence the shoot. I have to be careful about how they perceive me; I have to maintain control.

Seckler: Let’s say the client agrees to do what you want. How do you direct the shoot?

Buck: I work in a general way. As we shoot, I may get more specific in my direction, but if I am general, then they might give me something that I wouldn’t have expected or requested. Sometimes I will literally just say, ‘Do something’ and they will do something that I never even thought about. People have done crazy things when I said ‘Do something.’

Seckler: Like the portrait of Billy Bob Thornton…

Buck: …where he’s peeing? That was totally decided ahead of time. I keep a running list of ideas. Basically I had that idea while I was on set. My best ideas often come when I am shooting. For instance, I was excited for the Vice shoot, so I bet I will use those ideas later. And that Billy Bob portrait was exactly that: I had been shooting a businessman a few years earlier in a field—and I can’t remember if he took a pee in the woods or if I just thought of pee in the background—but I thought it would be interesting because it would change the color of the backdrop. It is a perfect union of vulgarity and beauty. The change in the color of the backdrop makes a subtle visual statement.

Seckler: What are the qualities of a great portrait?

Buck: A great portrait must have vulnerability. If there is no vulnerability, I don’t find it interesting.

Seckler: Why do you think vulnerability is essential?

Buck: Vulnerability draws you in. It’s just like a person who is humble—they make you curious about what they are going to reveal.

Seckler: What do you specifically try to capture?

Buck: I try to capture conflict in my images. I don’t think that’s unusual for a photographer. If your subject is known for one thing, I try to get ideas in there that are the opposite of what the audience expects.

Seckler: Why opposing ideas?

Buck: It’s like the baby in the Vice shoot. My subjects were known for being provocative. Babies are innocent. Vice is exactly the opposite of innocence. Once I had the idea, the execution was about trying to make the photograph feel like a real moment.

Seckler: How do you define your shooting method?

Buck: I have a dry sense of humour. There are also ways in which I frame my subjects that are repeated. My style developed slowly. Later I realized that not having such a distinctive style served me well.

Seckler: What does your work reveal about you? Are you violent or self-destructive?

Buck: I have a self-destructive streak. At a certain point in my career I had to learn not be self-destructive. I did things that hurt my chances of success, or I wouldn’t do things that would help me as a way to undercut myself. I had to overtly choose to be successful.

Seckler: Is most of your work editorial or do you do a lot of advertising?

Buck: In the last few years I have shifted toward advertising. In terms of days of shooting it might be still two-thirds editorial, but my advertising work is substantial.

Seckler: Why did it take you longer to get regular advertising jobs?

Buck: My interests were largely editorial. I came to advertising only after having success as an editorial photographer.

Seckler: Why hadn’t you approached more potential clients?

Buck: If I could do one thing differently, it would be to [go back in time and] think seriously about advertising earlier in my career.

Seckler: Isn’t advertising more rigid then editorial? Does that lack of flexibility conflicted with your style?

Buck: Advertising is more specific, but I tend to get hired for shoots I’m appropriate for. Advertising has got to look good in any [lighting] condition, so you have to ace it. It is more fun to shoot advertising because it is technical, but they want my style, so I have to retain a sense of self. I am very much a vital part of the process; I am very vocal about who I want and the locations where we shoot.

Seckler: What appeals to you about photographing people?

Buck: The human face is interesting. People are interested in faces and body language. In a way, making images is my way of connecting with people.

Seckler: How would you shoot your own self-portrait?

Buck: I did a self-portrait for Esquire where I photographed myself with a black eye. It was violent. I also did another with a stuffed toy elephant coming out of my fly, which was sexual. An earlier self-portrait showed me nude—so there you go, sex and violence.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

Belgian photographer Kurt Stallaert imagery is as broad as it is idiosyncratic. He shoots fine art, fashion, advertising, and more recently motion pictures. His work is united by a shadowy cheer and quirky humor in striking images. For these reasons, and because of his inexhaustible drive, his work is distinctive and has earned him dozens of major ad campaigns and from many top industry publications. Few of his images demonstrate his creative prowess and his tenacity on the set more than our featured image which was featured on the cover of Luerzer’s Archive.

Advertisements for paint companies are typically about as interesting as watching paint dry. This campaign for Belgium-based paint company Levis certainly splashed new color on the genre. Ad agency TBWA had the idea of promoting the “Fashion for Walls” concept (paint colors inspired by the latest catwalk trends) somewhat literally: turn the paint into a dress. The idea was brilliant and the execution of creating the image had to be similarly brilliant or it would fall flat. Stallaert approached the project initially thinking CGI was the answer but quickly realized that that technology was best for reproducing something that already exists and that wasn’t the case here. Once the decision was made to do everything in camera he started out by putting fabric on a mannequin and blowing it in different directions with a wind machine to get an idea for basic shapes that could be made with the “paint dress.” Once he and the ad agency were happy with a shape they proceeded to get down to the dirty work.

Stallaert and his team built a basic set consisting of two Chimera soft boxes attached to one Broncolor power pack each. One soft box was placed about three feet directly above the mannequin (which was used in place of the real model ) and the other about 12 feet to the left of the camera position at about four and a half feet above the mannequin. A Hasselblad with an 80mm lens and a Phase One P45+ digital back was brought in for image capture. After the gear was in place came the plastic tarp. The whole set was meticulously covered in plastic to prevent any of the splashing paint from wrecking the gear. Once the set was done came the fun part: the team proceeded to throw about 25 gallons of red paint at the mannequin as Stallaert snapped image after image of mid-air paint mayhem. The goal was to get a range of splashes that could then be melded together in Photoshop to create a whole dress. Afterwards they setup a duplicate lighting setup with a human model and created images that would be composited onto the paint dress.

The shoot went as planned and the client was happy with how things turned out but Stallaert and his creative partners at TBWA weren’t quite satisfied with the shape of the paint dress. So a week of work was scrapped to start the whole process over again. The second shoot fortunately produced a more perfectionist pleasing range of paint shapes. They used the paint images from the second shoot along with the original model shots to create the final image in Photoshop.

The amount of planning and dedication Stallaert gave to the Levis campaign is no less then what he puts into a personal project. He recently shot a big budget personal shoot based around the concept of children with large bodybuilder type bodies. He captured these beings, existent only in the world of Photoshop of course, in somewhat surreal situations—carrying each other like surfboards, oddly squeezed into a housekeeping uniform, or seated at a card table with bulging legs visible and Bicycle cards swallowed by their tan, oiled hands. The personal project began as a passion, and evolved; Stallaert says the same thing about his start in the business, which he calls typical. “You have to be a little bit lucky to get the good jobs and to make good pictures. Yet continuously, I’m looking for new techniques, new evolutions, that’s something I have to do to do all time. I don’t want to find a technique and to keep this technique for the rest of my life.”

Stallaert was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Let’s start talking about the image we’re featuring, the Levis image how did you created this image?

Stallaert: Every year or so European paint manufacturer Levis asks a famous designer to create some special paint colors for their Fashion for Walls concept. So this ad was created to promote their new color. It was a rather difficult job for me. When I saw the layout I was immediately thinking about 3D in combination with real paint. But CGI is good to reproduce something which already exists and then mix in something new. But this was a shape which had to be invented. It’s wasn’t a good option to use CGI so I decided to shoot everything in camera. I started out using fabric to get a basic idea for shapes we could eventually create with paint. The fabric was only used as a guide to creating realistic shapes that would ultimately be made with real paint.  We used the fabric to give a rough idea to show the client what kind of shape we wanted to make and once we agreed on that then we started with paint. We used wind machines blowing into the fabric to create an elegant and natural feeling. Ultimately the fabric shapes ended up being much too simple so we threw a lot of paint also in the air with different intensities and different amounts of paint in the bottles. We also threw it on a female mannequin to see how it would look on a real person. All these little things we used to make this model.

F STOP: Tell me about the actual throwing of the paint. It must have been very messy.

Stallaert: It was a mess. The stage was full of paint. Lamps, lighting, everything was full of paint because you cannot control it. We threw it and then it just splashes down everywhere. We’d laid lots of plastic down, of course, but it was quite a mess.

F STOP: The main part of the ‘paint-dress’ is so smooth especially where her thigh and leg area is how did you accomplish that?

Stallaert: It’s almost one shot.

F STOP: Really?

Stallaert: Yeah. The middle part is almost one shot and then you have little parts that are left when it came out of the can. The left and the right side are little splashes but the middle is almost one shape.

F STOP: Why do you think you were chosen to do this project by the ad agency?

Stallaert: I am somebody who jumps into a project and just goes for it, and I am not happy when it is not good enough. This project we had to go as far as we could. It was quite a hard job. In the beginning we had another shape we created for the paint dress and after retouching the client was already happy but neither the creative team nor I were happy so we had to restart everything. It was almost one week’s work for nothing. They didn’t like that a lot, but now they are very happy they restarted it. I have a good feel for sensual images that are not too perfect. My images are not too retouched. We do a lot of retouching but I’m not the kind of photographer that’s going to make images look too retouched. This is an image that has a natural feel to it, it’s not too perfect. I do not like images that are too perfect, I don’t feel that they are realistic.

F STOP: How did you achieve that not too perfect look?

Stallaert: We left in little imperfections, not perfectly smooth areas, shadows that don’t look perfect. Like under the hands to the right, those types of dark imperfect areas. If it was perfect it would look more fluid and more uniform. But here you feel that it’s realistic. I didn’t want to make the shape exactly like a woman’s body either so that you body takes away attention from the overall look. Under the breasts you feel her shape much more, but I didn’t want to do it everywhere because then it becomes too easy. This had to be more elegant and fashionable without being too sexy.

F STOP: Let’s talk about how you started off as a photographer.

Stallaert: Like a lot of photographers, I suppose, it was a hobby. I think you have to be a little bit lucky to get the good jobs and to make good pictures. It’s still a passion, photography. I never feel like I am working. Yet continuously, I’m looking for new techniques, new evolutions, that’s something I have to do all the time. I don’t want to find a technique and to keep this technique for the rest of my life. Photography is an evolution and that’s what I like.

F STOP: Now when you say techniques, what are some of the techniques that you are referring to? Are you talking about lighting or retouching…?

Stallaert: It’s a combination of everything. In general I adapt my technique, my lighting and my feel of the idea. Especially when I am shooting for advertising. The idea is most important and then the picture has to explain the idea as well as possible. What is quite important in advertising is that you work in the fashion of the work and the client and not in the fashion of what you want to do yourself. I have pro bono for that and my artistic work for that. When I am working for a client it’s a combination of working together with the creative.

F STOP: The Levis campaign we’ve featured was done for the European market, which many observe is quite different from the US market. Do you think your imagery translate well a to American advertising?

Stallaert: I think my images are quite creative and not very classic. I have the impression that the American market is a little more classic.

F STOP: Now what do you mean by classic? Do you mean conservative?

Stallaert: Maybe a little less humour, more…

F STOP: More obvious humour?

Stallaert: Yeah I think so.

F STOP: So I want to ask you a bit about your television work, how did you get into that?

Stallaert: It started from a client that wanted to shoot stills and film. I proposed to do the film portion and they agreed to give me a shot. It was not a very difficult job as I am used to directing a lot of my models. It is completely different though. You work with a bigger team, a lot more people who have influence on the project.

F STOP: Did you feel like the technical side was fairly similar to shooting stills.

Stallaert: Yeah the camera the lights, that’s something I understand. I see if it’s good or not and I can ask to change it, it’s very much like working as a photographer. I tell my assistants how I want the light and they make those changes.

F STOP: Earlier in our conversation you mentioned how people are almost always in your images. What is it that you like about photographing people?

Stallaert: I think it is the human contact. When they ask me to make a still life shot, even for a simple thing, I am even more stressed then when they ask me to shoot several people together.

F STOP: What images are your most proud of in your career thus far?

Stallaert: The bodybuilders series in my personal work is my favourite because I like the feel of the images and the subject matter. The images are in normal situations, it’s not a bodybuilder flexing on a stage, it’s something more realistic. These are some of the first images I’ve created that I’d like to put in my living room. It’s not easy to make an that I’d like to look at everyday.

F STOP: How did you create the bodybuilder images?

Stallaert: First, like usual, I’m looking for good locations, good casting, perfect styling. Once all of that is together on the shoot day I first put the bodybuilders in place and photographed them in certain positions. Then I put the children in the same place. My camera didn’t move when we were shooting so it was easy to composite the children over the bodybuilders’ bodies. I used a combination of daylight and artificial lighting.

F STOP: How long does it take you to create a project like the bodybuilders?

Stallaert: The idea took me the longest. I had several ideas and I of course only want to use the strongest idea. Once I have the idea finalized it can go quite fast. I think it was done in one month.  I was looking for locations, checking locations, checking people, casting, checking stylists. I was lucky because my production company which I use quite a lot was helping me with all of this. So they did location hunting and then I checked everything. The shooting was during two days and then retouching for four or five days, almost one week. It is quite expensive, but I really wanted to do it and make it right. I enjoy investing in my own projects. The feeling I get when people buy my images, it’s so special to feel they really like my personal work and vision. I am not thinking in a commercial way when I am making my own images, instead it’s a little bit like a musician making his own music.

To see more of Stallaert’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

At age 35, Michael Levin left behind his original career as a restaurant owner to experiment with an inexpensive digital camera. Just a few years later, he has been called a “rising star” by Focus magazine which called his images “soulful and evocative,” and year after year, the prize panels agree. Levin has been recognized as Photographer of the Year by the International Photography Awards and at Prix de la Photographie. He regularly places in fine art and book categories in these competitions, as well as in the PDN Photo Annual.

Levin cites painter Mark Rothko as an early influence, as well as Michael Kenna. The latter may come as no surprise, perhaps, given the extended exposure and eerie landscape of our featured image. Levin praises Kenna’s surreal images. “I wondered how this guy could make a tree or a stick in the mud look so unbelievable,” he says.  Patience and commitment temper Michael Levin’s meteoric rise in the photography world; they are also the hallmarks of his approach on location.

Levin’s editing process is intense. Our featured image was created during a three-week long photography excursion through Italy; it was the only image he selected for his portfolio (an alternate angle and a video of the location follow below). His dedication to his subject matter is equally intense “I fired off shots all day and all night for two days,” he says of photographing this one pier. “I had driven past a thousand docks, this one was different,” he says. He used a Linhof 4×5 camera loaded with black and white film and a Schneider 80mm XL lens. The lens was stopped down during the twenty minute exposure and only basic Photoshop work was used to clean up the image. Levin admires the beauty of film but unfortunately for him in this case most of the two days shooting this scene could have been spent relaxing in his hotel room “The final photograph turned out to be very first shot I took at night,” he says.

ZEBRATO – EBS – Verona, Italy, 2008 from Michael Levin on Vimeo.

His career, which began only a few years ago, has the velocity that any budding photographer would dream of. With only five photographs in his portfolio he was approached by IKEA about turning his images into posters; two years later they had sold hundreds of thousands of posters worldwide. Before long, a gallery owner wanted to represent him. As much as he draws on painting, there is something of the poet in him: he is spare in what he includes, unsparing in what he discards. This, too, is part of his success. “My dealers appreciate how I edit,” he says. “Photographers have a hell of a time editing their own work. They might have two great photographs, but eight of them are mediocre and they bring down the level of those two great photographs.”His business sense, from his previous life as a restaurateur, has helped him rise from obscurity as much as talent. “My job is to promote my work as much as possible. That’s the reason that the work is successful,” he says, telling the story of pitching his first book to a popular UK-based publisher that is inundated with book proposals every week. “I sat down and really thought about why he should publish my book and wrote a cover letter to him which I FedEx’d with the rest of the package. About two weeks later I got an e-mail from him saying that the work was interesting and [he] wanted to talk about it further.” He sent only one book pitch: “He was the guy I wanted.”Levin is proud to stand apart from the crowd, whether on a publisher’s desk or an Italian pier. Fondness enters his voice as he recalls sleeping in his car, compelled to capture the image that had made him stop at this pier of all piers, busy even at 4AM. “[The fishermen] were wondering what the hell is this guy doing,” he said.A strange scene to be sure, but strange scenes, especially abroad, have always engaged him.  “I can remember driving around on the family trips down to the US and it seems like I was always looking at an interesting rock rather than a landmark,” he says. “I like looking at these very common views with an uncommon sort of approach spending time in places that easily go unnoticed interests me. There are certainly times when I am photographing and I might happen to be in an area where a lot of photographers are, like a beautiful sunset and I am always pointed in the other direction.”

Levin was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Let’s start by discussing the featured image, Zebrato. Please tell us about how you created this photograph.Levin: It was shot in Italy during the Spring of ’05.  I went on a three-week excursion through the country just to shoot. I took hundreds of photographs, but this ended up being the only shot that made it into my portfolio.F STOP: From the entire trip?

Levin: From the entire trip. I have a box full of 4×5 negatives here that will never see the light of day. It was early in my photographic career and I was still trying to figure out composition and the technical aspects of long exposure photography. I think the editing process is often overlooked by photographers in general. I’m really tight about editing and at the time that was the only one that made sense to me.

F STOP: What made sense for you about it?

Levin: It was clear that it would be a harmonious addition to my then small portfolio. The clouds are very dramatic in that image. I originally didn’t want the fishermen sitting at the end of the dock, but in the end it actually turned out to be quite amazing. He adds both  context and mystery to the image.

F STOP: How did you come across this location?

Levin: The locations aren’t actually listed on any of my photographs anymore because I don’t really know where I am a lot of the time. I’m not focused on capturing vistas of known locations, it’s the subject matter that is most important. I find my locations by chance, just driving around and surveying. I found the Zebrato location about half way through my three week trip. I thought it was special at the time. I spent two days photographing that pier from slightly different angles. With long exposure photography you never know what you are going to get with cloud formations, so I fired off shots all day and all night for two days. The final photograph turned out to be the very first shot I took at night.

F STOP: So you didn’t know it at the time but you could have stopped at the first shot and gotten it.

Levin: Exactly, and slept in a hotel as opposed to sleeping in my car.

F STOP: It’s impressive that you dedicated yourself to spend two days just photographing one location. Why did you decide to do that?

Levin: I’m the kind of person that when I need to capture a scene I’ll do whatever it takes. If I need to stay there all day in my car in the pouring rain in order to get the shot, I’ll do it. I had driven past a thousand docks, this one was different. I was engaged with the texture of the dock and those two upright posts really separated this from the others. There is a commitment with every photograph, but some you just feel more strongly than others.  That was the case with this photograph.

F STOP: Were there people around? I mean, you were there for two days.

Levin: There were people around and I’m sure they were thinking ‘what the hell is this guy doing?’ This location was quite remote and these guys were just fishing all day long. They just sort of walked by me and nodded quizzically while speaking Italian to me.

F STOP: You mentioned that you were trying to get fluctuations in tide and the ambient light throughout the day. The final image was shot at night. Did you know you wanted a night shot?

Levin: Typically I have the most success at nighttime with these images; you’re able to have longer exposures with the low light and no harsh shadows. I took photos during the day because I was there and it was a very remote location, it wasn’t like I could go for coffee or anything. The 5am light is what I was most interested in capturing.

F STOP: Why does the water appear to be white?

Levin: That’s the way I visualized the scene, white water with a strong black line reaching for infinity. I tend to try and visually create dramatic scenes from very pedestrian views.

F STOP: Aside from the equivalent of dodging and burning did you do anything else to the image in Photoshop?

Levin: No, that’s it. But I certainly spent a long time trying to manipualte the tones in the clouds. When you look at the video, you can see it’s a very dark and brooding sky in real life. There was a storm brewing in the distance and I think this adds the drama to the image.

F STOP: Did you  always do twenty minute exposures, or did you mix it up a bit?

Levin: I mix it up all the time. This was metered for twenty minutes. It was getting dark out and I needed that extra time to expose the film properly.

F STOP: Moving on, how did you get your start in photography?

Levin: I owned a restaurant for five years and sold it when I was 35. Around that time I bought a digital Canon D60 camera and started shooting in color, without direction, when I had time away from the restaurant. I was shooting everything and was naturally leaning towards minimalism with some of the photos. The only art that had really moved me at the time was Mark Rothko.  Beyond that, I didn’t really have an art background. Soon after that I discovered Michael Kenna. That is where I think the seed was planted, that style of photography. I wondered how this guy could make a tree or a stick in the mud look so unbelievable. I took some time off after selling the restaurant and became more engaged with photography. When I started printing my photographs at a local lab, a couple of gallery owners saw them and asked to represent me. At that point, I only had five or so photographs! About 6 months later, a buyer from IKEA wanted to license two of my photographs for posters. It was like a year after I had started shooting and all of a sudden IKEA wanted to do a deal with me, a little surreal at the time.  At that point, I realized that I actually could make a real go at photography. A couple of years later and IKEA had sold hundreds of thousands of posters all over the world.

F STOP: You have been incredibly successful in such a short amount of time. You have a book out and you’ve won all these awards and have all this recognition. How does it feel to go from having a hobby and then a year later having IKEA make thousands of posters?

Levin: It feels great. It turned from a hobby into a business very quickly and fortunately I had the business background and ability to make that transition. As for the awards I do feel humbled, I work very hard at it, there’s no doubt.

F STOP: What kind of process do you use to choose your locations?

Levin: I’ve had businesses that have allowed me the freedom to travel as that was always a priority in my life. The great thing about photography is that it facilitates this perfectly. I had initially started shooting around the Pacific Northwest and I soon wanted another venue. The next place I went to was France and then England. I recognized that before I could go and photograph these places, I would have to market my work and get a business model in place. I spent a lot of time on that, which eventually enabled me to go on these trips financed by my sales. Fortunately, the market was really good back then. The photographs seemed to resonate with people and they were selling. I would fly off to France for a month and then just drive around and shoot. Every trip I would get a couple of photographs, so I have fifty photos from about twenty trips. I should mention that although I have 50 B&W images in my portfolio I also have quite a few color landscape images that I feel are equally as strong. I’ll eventually do a show with this work but it’s not quite ready yet. The majority of the work was done with a 8×10 camera in Iceland back in the summer of ‘07. Iceland really is this mythical place and you just look at the landscape and wonder if it is real.  I have since travelled through South Korea and Japan several times.
F STOP: What was the moment when you decided to start taking the long exposures that define your work?

Levin: It was my first photograph, “Ferry Docks,” which was taken here in British Columbia back in the Fall of ‘03. I went to this location and photographed it like a normal snapshot image and as the light was fading I did longer and longer exposures. It was then that I realized that was the look I was going for.

F STOP: So you fell in love with that because your affinity for minimalism?

Levin: It was a starting point. It better enabled me to realize the potential for this style of photography. Images can really take on a painterly quality at this point and I think that’s where the Rothko inspiration became evident to me.

F STOP: You mentioned starting off with a digital camera, but ultimately all your work is shot on 4×5 film.

Levin: I started with the digital camera and I was doing little prints with it that were around  8”x8”. The quality was great (at least I thought so at the time), but if I wanted to make anything bigger it would start to get pixelated and I didn’t like that at all. I saw Michael Kenna’s work in a gallery in San Francisco and it was the first time I had ever been exposed to “real” photographs. They also had  30”x40” photographs that were very dramatic and I thought it elevated the photograph to a whole other level. It was at that moment that I realized I needed to get a film camera in order to achieve this level of visual quality.

F STOP: And why black and white?

Levin: I think there is more flexibility with black and white as far as manipulation goes, I don’t mean Photoshop but rather the ability to expand on tonal ranges and have them still look real. I’m more apt at creating emotion in a B&W print, rather than color.

F STOP: Tell me about your subject matter. It’s almost all natural landscape without people in it. Why have you chosen that?

Levin: I can’t quite pinpoint it. I’m certainly attracted to symmetry in nature and in man-made structures. It’s hard to describe it, more of a intuitive feeling when I see it. Whatever the subject matter is, I want to try to elevate it from beyond a level of being pedestrian. I feel compelled to reveal it’s own private beauty.

F STOP: Do you think you are going to stick with this subject matter for awhile longer?

Levin: Well I think the subject matter is vast and I have lots to explore. I really don’t think in terms of series or themes, whatever engages me I will continue to photograph. I do mix it up, you just haven’t seen it yet!

F STOP: You use Photoshop for the equivalent of dodging and burning. Have you ever thought about using Photoshop to composite in a better looking cloud or something like that, or does that just not appeal to you?

Levin: Even though I have been using Photoshop for five years, I’m still somewhat limited. So when I am out there I take tons of negatives so I do get those great clouds. I have a number of images that are good but not great on account of the clouds or tide level and I will eventually go back and reshoot those until I get it right. I don’t think I could pull it off as far as compositing images goes. I read your interview with Darran Rees and the work these guys do is incredible, it’s so beyond my skill level in the Photoshop department. I do take out some minor things in images if I find them distracting.

F STOP: Is there a message that you want the viewer to take away for your artwork?

Levin: No. These are simply photographs I take because I like to take them and I think they capture the spirit of my experience there.

F STOP: Would you say you are almost exclusively a fine art photographer?

Levin: Yes.

F STOP: Do you have any interest in doing anything else?

Levin: I’d like to be a better classical guitar pIayer! I’ve done a few private commissions, but if someone said, “here is the product, go take some nice photographs” then I am not interested at all. I like doing exactly what I’m doing.

F STOP: It’s really impressive how quickly you’ve found success and that you’re represented by so many galleries. How did you begin your relationships with these different galleries worldwide?

Levin: I approached photography as a business. Initially I interviewed two different gallery owners here in Vancouver to find out how it all worked.  I asked them what they thought the strengths and weaknesses of their artists were and what they looked for when they review portfolios.  These basic questions gave me a good foundation to go on and learn about the art world. I then became represented by a gallery here in Vancouver and I aimed for Toronto next. At the time I had about ten photographs in my portfolio. Looking back, it seems quite comical that an artist with ten photographs gets representation. When I sent out a CD, I spoke of my dedication to the work and the presentation was paramount. I asked a lot of questions at first. Fortunately, I am interested in a type of photography that a lot of people seem to respond to. There are a lot of great photographers out there who take amazing images, but they don’t seem saleable. I also started entering photography competitions and it helped that I won. I received first place in the first contest that I entered. Then I became aware of other competitions and started submitting my work and the big one was the International Photography Awards in 2006 where I won Nature Photographer of the Year. That started opening up a lot of doors. I started getting magazine articles and people calling me who wanted to represent my work. I have been fortunate, but I also work at it continuously, which is important as a fine art photographer. My job is to promote my work as much as possible.  That’s a big factor in why the work has been successful

F STOP: Tell us about the process of publishing your book.

Levin: I started thinking about a book in October of 2007, but I only had about 40 photographs at the time. I knew that by the time any publisher would respond I’d probably have another 7 images and that would be enough for a book. When I thought about publishers I thought Europe would be the best place to start as I already had presence in the US and Canada. I thought if I went through a European publisher they would be able to elevate awareness of my work in a market that I had a small footprint in. I searched out publishers and decided that my number one choice was Dewi Lewis Publishing in the U.K.I sat down and really thought about why he should publish my book and wrote a cover letter and included about 10 small prints. About two weeks later I got an e-mail from him saying that the work was interesting and wanted to talk about it further. At that point I was confident that we could make something happen. The highly unusual thing about this is that I had only sent out one proposal, so I was extremely fortunate. I had only sent out one book pitch because they were the publishers I wanted.

F STOP: What was the reason you gave him for why he should publish your book?

Levin: At the time that I wrote the letter I had won that International Photography Award. It was the 2006-2007 season and there was momentum behind my name and he was aware of that. I told him that I would work hard at marketing the book in North America and try to get as much press as possible. So, less than a year later the book has won some great awards and is almost sold out.

To see more of Michael Levin’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton

Edited by Jesi Khadivi

Whether shooting Jason Kidd for Sports Illustrated or the anonymous maintainers of Times Square’s “guts” for the New York Times Magazine, Stephen Wilkes frames his subjects to reveal a truth about them. He captures the humanity of a glistening Chinese skyscraper, of an Ellis Island office a century removed from the last huddled masses it welcomed. His impressive career encompasses editorial, advertising, and fine art work of equal skill and renown. All are united by his attention to detail and his keen sense of the eye’s hidden rhythm.

Time, Portfolio, and Vanity Fair are just a few of the many glossies featuring Wilkes’ images. His photojournalism transitions naturally into fine art, which he approaches as social documentary. This was nowhere more true than in his images of contemporary China, a country he had last seen in 1978, just two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution.  “Whole cities had changed, they weren’t even recognizable,” he says. “Because of my unique perspective, I had a true concept of what China was versus what China has become. One of the things I was drawn to was humanizing the factory worker.” His method of humanizing the worker relied on capturing what he calls the “epic quality” of China’s factory buildings and their cavernous, glimmering interiors. A sense of uniformity pervades the images, with shimmering steel filling a room populated by workers wearing dull orange shirts. Carefully framed and symmetrically balanced the human subjects seem as vulnerable as Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The image on his website set outdoors echoes this symmetry, while foregrounding the loneliness of the single worker living—for that that moment—between the buildings.

His approach to fine art, editorial work, and even advertising is informed by his understanding of photography as “the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things.” This idea, featured on his website and excerpted from a Henri Cartier-Bresson essay, runs throughout his work. It is nowhere clearer than in our featured image, a shot of the Highline that appeared in New York Magazine. The shot appealed to Wilkes because of the “intimacy” it offered with the buildings. But shooting from rooftops didn’t satisfy him. “Everything was a little too high,” he said. “I was losing the intimacy.” So he shot from a cherry picker at points throughout the day, then worked with a retoucher to electronically blend the images together. He wanted to capture the floating, expansive feeling that had drawn him to the Highline to begin with, and settled on a 17^th Street location. This ended up being key, as the other challenge of the shoot was finding an effective transition point between day and night shots. Wilkes picked a good spot.

Wilkes shot this image using a 39 megapixel digital back on a 4 x 5 camera. He embraces large-format photography because it gives his all-important details greater depth. “So much of my work is about levels of story,” he says.  He rotated the camera manually on a tripod throughout the day as he shot tons of images of the Highline while different street scenes unfolded within his frame (“The last thing you want to do is come back to the studio and have this great picture but realize you’re missing something”). He varied his exposure throughout, keeping a constant f-stop but varying the shutter speed to allow for proper exposure as the sun set. Periodically he and his retoucher, who was in the cherry picker with him, would load images onto a laptop and start creating rough comps to make sure he was getting what he needed. The final image was created by simply stitching together multiple images in Photoshop.

Wilkes’s success is due in no small part to his executive producer. She knows him well; in fact, they’ve been married 26 years. “People either think it is great or that we are nuts,” he says. “But it works for us.” Long-standing relationships have been crucial to his success, as a lesson he learned from his father demonstrates: treat every job like your first one. The Highline shot underscored the joy of working with supportive colleagues. “The great thing about working with people who trust you to do what you do [is] you can take something that is really interesting but take it to another level,” he said. “That’s always exciting when you can take something that’s unfamiliar for some people, and familiar for others and make something dramatically different.”

Wilkes was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: The genesis of this idea for your Highline image came from a shot that you had actually done several years earlier, right?

Wilkes: Changing time in a single photograph is a very interesting concept. The genesis of this idea really happened many years ago when I was working for Life magazine on “a big picture”. They hired me to photograph Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio as Romeo and Juliet, and I had an opportunity to photograph them along with the entire cast and crew in Mexico City where they were filming. We spent about four days waiting to actually get the entire cast and crew into this one photograph and Life had asked me to create a panoramic gatefold.  When we got to the set, I realized that the set was actually a huge square. So I decided to take the square and break it apart, ala David Hockney, using individual images. I ended up shooting over 250 images that I pasted together by hand. The interesting time aspect came into play when in the centre of the photograph is where the stars are, Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes, they are literally in a moment of embrace when everybody else, cast and crew, is surrounding them. To the right side of the photograph is a huge mirror, probably 20 feet in height. I asked them to kiss for the reflection image. So the reflection does not match the centre embrace, they are kissing in the reflection. When you look at the photograph quickly you think the image in the mirror is a reflection. But then you realize that the reflection is a time change and a completely different moment. That idea stayed with me for a while. 

F STOP: A lot of your work deals with time: blurred motion and long exposures. What appeals to you about it?

Wilkes: It’s true of some of my work, especially the China series where I shoot long exposures so you don’t see people. I am interested in creating voids in physical space. If I am shooting architecture I want your focus to be on the architecture. Usually, It’s just a single element that I am drawn to. I’m interested in scale and the context of humanity within that scale. A lot of my China work delves into that. By the same token, I do shoot single decisive moments. I look for a certain type of spontaneity. I’ve been known to wait hours to get it, patience is a photographers secret weapon. I work on both ends of that spectrum, it really depends on the story I am trying to tell and what I am photographing. 

F STOP: How did you become interested in photography and what was your path to becoming a professional photographer?

Wilkes: My first photographs were taken through a microscope when I was twelve years old. That shot of a paramecium sort of changed my life. The combination of seeing a microscopic world and actually holding a photograph in my hand for the first time excited me in a way I had never felt about anything. I had a portrait done of me and my twin brother by a candle light at our bar mitzvah and I remember looking at the photo and thinking it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, I wanted to learn from this guy. So I ended up working for the photographer for almost a year in Jamaica Queens every Saturday. By the time I was 15 I already knew how to make the wedding albums, where the prints were made, and how to do the double exposure of the couple in the champagne glass.  I started my own little business and I had cards printed up.  By the time I was 16, I was doing weddings, special events, whatever I could do as the local kid in the neighbourhood. I used to go to people and say listen I know I’m young, take advantage of me while I’m young an innocent. I had a pretty good reputation, and I was getting work. I published a photograph in Cover Girl magazine when I was 18. I had taken photographs of  a model, which she used to enter a contest with the magazine. When she won they called and told her they wanted me to re-shoot the photo in color for the cover.

I’ve been blessed with great teachers and mentors my whole life. I had incredible professors during my college years at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. When I left school I became Jay Maisel’s assistant and after a year I became his associate, which was when I started shooting my own jobs. Jay was my mentor, and  of the many lessons he taught me the most important was just how hard you have to work to make it in this business. I was Jay’s associate for 2 years, and with Jay’s blessing ventured out on my own. I do feel that the more you practice the luckier you get. I feel there is a direct relationship in any type of mastery with how much time you put into something. I have good fortune to be as excited today as I was when I was 13. That’s what this picture is about, in a way I continue to challenge the idea of what a photograph can be. I’m always interested in doing something different and I think sometimes people are sort of surprised when they think they have me pigeon holed and then I do something completely different. I am interested in pursuing all aspects of the art.

F STOP: Your work seems to oscillate between produced images for big commercial clients and a more intimate photojournalistic style. Tell me about that dichotomy.

Wilkes: I take pictures and then I make pictures. I love doing both; I love discovering something and photographing it. On the other hand as I have grown as a professional, I have developed the craft and the professionalism of learning how to produce a job. I think the basis of even being able to execute jobs like that comes down to abilities to work with people and create an environment where people feel comfortable and relaxed

F STOP: Where do you think your interest in these two modes of photography stem from?

Wilkes: My core philosophy about photography came from journalism. I was a street photographer; I used to go out for hours at a time, that ‘s where I really cut my chops.  Street shooting is like being a hunter; you can see how a moment builds. You can sense it happening. I think when you develop your eye through the study of gesture, movement and human nature; the ability to create those moments eventually translates to you as a director. When I work on big commercial jobs, I direct the movement and the moment, so to speak. But if you don’t understand the movement and the nature of human gestures then my pictures don’t have that energy or sense of realism. I think it all starts at being a real student of photojournalism.

F STOP: Where did the interest in doing advertising develop?

Wilkes: It just became a challenge for me. People used to look at my work early on and they couldn’t even realize I was lighting. That was kind of interesting, there was a perception that I had incredible luck all the time. When in reality I had discovered how to light and produce images that look found. But then rather than go away from that idea, I felt like I could even do something more. As my career began to grow I began doing even bigger production photographs for major campaigns. I remember doing the launch campaign for a new Kodak film called Ektar, I had to photograph a guy propelling down the top of the totem pole in Monument Valley. It was an enormous production. We had these professional stunt guys dropped via helicopter on top of this 600 ft high stone monolith, there was only one place in the United States that makes a single piece of rope 600 feet long that a climber could repel with. It happened to be in New York City. There were amazing challenges, yet we pulled it off. Each project creates its own set of challenges. I think that’s what I love, the challenges. We do so much of the legwork prior to shooting; the easiest part for me is the actual shooting. Once we have done all our homework, I am just living in the moment when I get on set. 

F STOP: Your executive producer is your wife Bette. Did that work relationship develop from a romantic relationship?

Wilkes: Yeah, absolutely. She was a hard driven and well-liked established businesswoman when I first met her. I was really impressed, we were the same age, she asked me what I did and I was like, “Oh, I’m this struggling photographer,” as I was assisting and doing what I could do. She was intrigued by what I did and she said she never saw pictures like my pictures. She always believed we would be successful, and told me I was one of the most ambitious people she’d ever met. When you’re in it, you don’t feel that way about yourself. We shared a one-room apartment for three years and just saved everything we could. Whatever we made we invested back into the business. 

F STOP: Do you know any other photographers with wives or husbands as their executive producers?

Wilkes: People either think it is great or that we are nuts. But it works for us. We’ve  been married for 26 years, so I think it’s worked pretty well.

F STOP: What do you think has been the one thing that has really formed your success?

Wilkes: My dad is a self made man, he made fragrances. He always used to tell me that he would sell a guy on the street two gallons of fragrances when he first started his business. As the business grew he continued to sell that guy those two gallons.  He never forgot the people who helped get him started in business. I always respected that and I guess for me I think if there is one key, it is to treat every job like my first job. I never bank on what I’ve done.

F STOP: Tell us about your fine art work. There seems to be a common line of capturing the architectural ascetics of a place and the character of that place. Do you agree? 

Wilkes: I feel like my work is sort of a social documentary approach to fine art. I mean that’s what I am drawn to. I realized when I created the Ellis Island work I could take pictures that were not only beautiful to look at, but could actually inspire people to change or get involved in something. 

F STOP: And in contrast to places that are forgotten you have the new factories in China. Tell me about that series.

Wilkes: Well China was a very interesting project for me because it was a way for me to look back and look forward at the same time. I had the good fortune in 1978 to go to China, two years after the Cultural Revolution had ended. It was a very important moment for me as a photographer. I was hyper-focused on the idea that I was a photographer and I was really looking to create a body of work that would separate me from a host of other photographers and get a career going. So that series of pictures even to this day is as powerful for me as it ever was. When I went back 27 years later, whole cities had changed, they weren’t even recognizable. I felt the need to photograph what I was seeing. I had a unique perspective on what China was versus what China has become. In the factories, beside the epic scale I was also drawn to humanizing the factory worker.

F STOP: How did you get access?

Wilkes: We wrote letters to a lot of these factories and showed them my work. I think they were very cautious because everybody is worried about being misrepresented. When I shared with them that I was doing pictures that were showing the epic quality of what Chinese factories are, what China has become, many of them acquiesced. I try to keep my China work very open. I don’t want to dictate how you should feel about my pictures. I am just showing it the way I see it, I want to allow the viewer to bring his or her own interpretation to the work.

To see more of Stephen Wilkes’ work visit his website.