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As time goes by, when it comes to my portrait work, a lot of how I judge success or failure relates to how I can connect with a subject…usually in an extremely limited time frame. Oh sure, I gotta come away with a beautiful portrait or two, but I really want to also learn a little of the people who spend time in front of my lens. So when The Wall Street Journal called and said we were gonna get ‘some time’ to shoot John Lithgow for Weekend Confidential and would I be interested, I knew that meant very little time, but I still immediately screamed “YES!!!”…cuz getting to pick his brain…and take a few photos…was gonna be fun!
Lithgow is epic. He’s an actor’s actor. I’d pay gold to watch him open an envelope! He was doing promotion for his new play, “Hillary And Clinton”, and we would be given a slot on a day that included a matinee performance followed by his appearing on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” followed by the evening performance, so I knew things had to be nailed down. On with the show…
For our first setup, I got to use a couple of new canvasses I recently got from Gravity Backdrops. They’re essentially the same…both a very low texture dark grey…and I layered the smaller of the two on top of the larger to create a bit of depth & shadow. For lighting, it’s pretty simple…just a 5′ parabolic umbrella on a boom jacked up as high as I could get it…
Gotta love one light…
I showed him a few lighting test shots of Richard and he said he understood the direction I was going towards…serious, thoughtful and introspective.
Mr. Lithgow, enter Stage Left…
In between shots, we talked about his new play, his career, his time as a student at Harvard, and a whole lot more. Then we moved on to our feature portrait, where we used two more Gravity drops and a sawhorse tabletop…lit with a 20″ gridded Profoto Beauty dish and filled by another 5-footer…
With just a bit of finesse…mostly just adding a flag camera right to throw a little shadow on the background and the side of John’s face…it looked like this…
It was the exact mood I was aiming at…
Finally, before he left, John insisted on photographing…me!
He grabbed the Hasselblad and immortalized me thusly…
All in all, it was a typically quick session…but extremely satisfying.
You can check out the final results over at The Wall Street Journal
Damn Ugly Photography 
Good work buddy.
Great job Brad! So enjoy all the people you get to shoot, in awe of you and the great stories you share also. Always knew since junior high you would go into photography as a career. Looking forward to the next.
Thought I noticed a ring flash shadow on one of the shots? Well done as always Mr. Trent
FUCHS!!! Actually, no ringlight…but thanks for dropping by…😂
stunning as usual. great feel to the light and the
overall look. great face too!
So good. As always. The issues of working with famous people mixed with cool, complicated, but beautiful lighting. Cheers, BT!