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OK…let’s get this outta the way right off the bat…
No, I did not get tickets to Hamilton!
Now…on with the show……
My string of extremely cool shoots for Arrive Magazine continued when Rob Smith offered up Lin-Manuel Miranda for a cover feature on the ‘Hamilton’ writer and star. The story was tied to the productions donation of 20,000 $10 tickets to High School students so they see private matinees of ‘Hamilton’ that also includes a Q&A with the cast afterwards. It’s all done with the hope that it will get students to enjoy learning history…and what better way to get teens to enjoy history than to have them rapping the incredibly infectious songs from the musical after they leave the theater?!! And for one of our main photos we would be shooting Lin-Manuel with a group of students!
There were of course the usual difficulties of a shoot like this…very limited shoot time…having to do a union call which besides being crazy expensive, meant we couldn’t even plug in a light or move as much as a clamp without having a Hamilton crew member do it for us…to not even knowing what kind of wardrobe Lin-Manuel would be wearing before he arrived. Then there was the fact that I had a wild chest cold that made me feel like death and took 90% of my voice away! But hammer on we must…
On the location scout we decided on a few locations…
A view from the stage for our shot with Lin-Manuel and the kids…
The back wall of the stage for a portrait…
And a corner up in the mezzanine that would work great for our cover…my editor Leigh Flayton was giving her acting chops a workout…
The ‘Hamilton’ wine being served in the Mezzanine Bar…
Since we are going to have very little time for our shots, we had to pre-light each shot in advance…that was a lotta light! We had three separate setups on the stage alone, as well as the cover we were doing up in the mezzanine…
Most of these lights were for the opening shot of Lin-Manuel with the kids…
But you can see the setup against the ‘rope wall’ in the background…
Rob and I checking out the opening shot…with some of the union crew approving in the back…
Here’s our first shot with stand ins for the opener…
…and how things got looking better when the ‘talent’ showed up…
But once we got the lighting dialed in a bit more, the final shot for the opener dazzled…
Next was our ‘rope wall’ shot. Since Matt and Lin-Manuel were about the same height, he got to be the stand in…
Then we dropped a seamless for a tight portrait. I wanted something a little darker and moodier, so we kept things pretty contrasty…and I tweaked the color way into the blue spectrum which made Matt’s baby-blues even dreamier than normal…
For Lin-Manuel I backed off a bit cuz I liked the shadow we were getting on the background…
Finally, we raced upstairs for the cover. It’s pretty hard to describe how tight this location was, and unfortunately we didn’t have the time to do any behind-the-scenes shots, but Lin-Manuel was stuck into the corner and I was no more than four feet away shooting between the railing of a very dark stairway with the widest lens I had!
Once again, I chose to shift the color balance towards the blue end of things since I didn’t really like how the dead green/cyan of the wallpaper was looking. I also popped the saturation of the gold quite a bit in CaptureOne which really made those frames stand out…
And here’s how it all turned out…
And I wasn’t kidding earlier…I still haven’t seen ‘Hamilton’…..but these kids did!!!
Damn Ugly Photography 