Recently, I did a series of publicity photos for local musician Seven Saturdays (a.k.a. Jonathan Haskell). We hiked up to an idyllic mystical patch of forest in Griffith Park where the light was swirly.

It was a fun shoot. Jonathan, like many people, wasn’t a fan of getting photographed. I kept the energy up with a lot of positive feedback. I’d contantly tell him when things were working, and when I liked what I was seeing. We chimped different shots together on the camera’s LCD and discussed what he was looking for. I threw out processing ideas while we were shooting, telling him my ideas for a “cold palette” which would match his intricate music which I found lovely and lonely at the same time. This constant communication kept us engaged and really helped the process. Jonathan said he was a big fan of “accidents” which I thought boded well for me. My whole life is an accident.

I brought two lenses for the Canon 5D: the 24-105 f/4L because of it’s amazing sharpness. I also brought the 50mm 1.4 to be able to take advantage of a really narrow depth-of-field. I also brought a speedlight and an umbrella and a voice-activated lightstand (a.k.a. Molly, the band manager I triggered it with Calumet LiteLinks with wireless RF. I switched back and forth between lenses a couple times. Then I brought out a Mamiya C-330 medium-format film TLR with a 65mm f/3.5. I hooked up the LiteLinks to the Mamiya as I have in the past, but I couldn’t get the Mamiya to trigger the LiteLink. I’m not sure why, I think the jack just needed to be held down. So I ended up just shooting one roll of Tri-X just for another look.

When I did my processing, I worked to get that cold palette for some of the shots, but we also did a lot of experimenting with a sunflare which really needed something a bit warmer. I ended up presenting him with three different series: A cold series, a b&w (film) series, and a warm series.

I felt there were twenty-two candidates for keepers. I shared those candidates with seven friends, just to get some feedback. I asked each of them to pick a least favorite, just to make sure that there wasn’t a clear loser that definitely should be jettisoned. Interestingly, of the seven people, none of them picked the same least-favorite. I decided that was a good sign that nothing was obviously terrible. I ended up presenting all twenty-two candidates to the client. He ended up wanting to use eleven of them, which I felt was a good encouraging number.

In addition to my favorite picture above, here is another example of the cold series:

I shot twelve frames of Tri-X and got four candidates. Really a great ratio. Here are a couple:

And then here a couple from the warm series. And by warm, I meant warm compared to the cold series. It’s definitely still a bit stark, but the forest really glows in those. After spending some time with these, I’ve recently decided not in love with the palette, but I do like how the light looks very alive. Not every decision we make is perfect. The very last photo wasn’t chosen by the client, but artistically I think it’s very strong. So, here it is: