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We here at Damn Ugly Photography have done many, many, many Barron’s Roundtable shoots over the years, but this time we came close to breaking the bank…literally! Our cover idea was to have the members of the Roundtable rockin’ Chef Props as they cooked up the perfect economic recipe for the coming year, and for our ‘ingredients’ we needed cash…lots and lots of cash…
Since Photoshop has added high-tech security filters that make it almost impossible to scan money and print it out…and prop money looks way too fake…we decided to hit my bank and just get real cash (that’s about $30 Grand in the bag) to use in our recipes…
The basic cover setup was a raised plexiglass platform that I could shoot from both a low angle for the cover image, and from slightly above for the inside compositions for the Week Two & Week Three images…
Hasselblad H1/50mm f4.0 with a Leaf Aptus 33 for the cover and the 5DmkII/24-70mm f2.8 for the higher-angle inside shots…
As in previous years, we have only two hours to shoot everybody…all separately as they arrive at The Harvard Club for the meeting…on two different sets, and we must come away with two covers (for the January and June Mid-Year issues), two inside openers for those covers, two feature openers for the second and third week follow-up issues and individual shots of each person for the June Mid-Year issue. In those two hours we try to cram in as many different poses and props as possible so we have enough to work with when it comes to assembling the final group shots. Here’s some of the fun…
Marni worked her super-fast makeup magic on everyone before they got on set…
Oscar Schafer…
Brian Rogers…
Fred Hickey…
Abby Joseph Cohen…
Scott Black…
Adrian and I liked the idea of placing everyone on the edge of a mountaintop made from a butcher block cutting board and viewing them from below…
…so once I shot a bunch of angles on the board, we had all the raw materials in place. Now it was up to me to assembly the individual shots into our cover and feature opening photos…
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This stuff never gets old!
Stay tuned next week and you’ll see what we did with all that cash once Barron’s runs the Week Two and Week Three images…
Damn Ugly Photography 
FUCK AN A! That’s a lot of money. GREAT CONCEPT AND IMAGES!!
Fantastic Job!
Thanks a lot for sharing!!!
You are a master!!!!
That`s just great, have readed all of your articles guys, always interesting and useful for me, keep it up! 🙂
I can’t beat Fuck An A for a comment!
Great Job, Brad! You are a magician.
Thank you for sharing oh great one;-)
Love it! I always look forward to your round table shoots 🙂 So what’s cooking’ for 2013? Are they burning money? (haha)
Excellent work as always. It really boils down to preparation and experience when you are shooting people of this calibre.
There is an trick to get wads of cash for film/photo as prop (!!!). We used it on different film sets.
Scan not the full banknote – scan it just with an edge of 1-2cm around (put an smaller paper than the note between scanner and note).
Photoshop will not recognize that this is money and you can print it – in a wad it looks like real if you use real money for the first and last banknote in the wad. With this trick u don’t need lots of cash (but only works with wads of notes in a bank wrapper).