London Sunday Times

Josh Silverman of ETSY for the London Sunday Times

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Andrew Mitchell, my editor at the London Sunday Times, sent us out to Brooklyn to the headquarters of Etsy…the online site where all the cool kids go to buy and sell hand-crafted and vintage stuff…to shoot their CEO, Josh Silverman. In less than three years, Silverman has taken a company that had slowing sales growth, climbing expenses and a stock price that had slumped 65 percent from it’s IPO, into a true Juggernaut in the space. Etsy’s investors love the guy and what his ideas have done for the formerly foundering company. It was sorta my job to illustrate those big ideas in a portrait…

Walking around Etsy’s two huge buildings in DUMBO, we passed by this kitchen space…

Now I’m not the kinda guy who lets a good metaphor go unnoticed, and those hanging light bulbs just screamed BIG IDEA…so we quickly threw up some lights and I had Robert jump up on that table…

The lighting was pretty simple…we let the windows bleed in a ton of ambient light to blow out the details from outside, and I added a couple of very bright rim lights on either side, then just dropped in some front fill from a gridded Profoto RFI boomed high above him…

After tweeking the color balance and contrast, this is how things were looking…

It was getting there, but it still needed some more drama…a bit more theatrical lighting oomph…so I added a mask (I was shooting tethered to Capture One Pro) and by using some reverse-clarity and really increasing the contrast, it gave the lightbulbs a wonderful glowing halo effect…

My ‘Light Bulb Over The Head’ metaphor was complete…

Just down the a hallway from our lightbulb shot was the Etsy Lab…sort of a ‘Test Kitchen’ that Esty suppliers can come and play in. It sorta has the feel of the ultimate Elementary School art class, with all the buttons, bows, paints, beads and glue sticks you would ever need to do whatever you might wanna do!

Sarah Marx, our liaison from Etsy, sat in for a quick iPhone test shot…

…and after a good dose of styling and lighting, we turned it into this…

And Josh dug it…

Here is the final page as it appeared in The Times…

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Ethan Hawke For The London Sunday Times

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Ethan Hawke has a new movie out…‘First Reformed’…and Adam Hearn from the Times of London offered me the opportunity to hang with him for a bit and hopefully come away with a few portraits for the cover of the Sunday Culture Magazine. Kaz and I headed out to Ruby Bird Studios in Brooklyn and here’s how things went…

I wanted to shoot at Ruby Bird cuz it’s dripping with character…point in just about any direction and you can’t help but have a great background. And besides a cool location, we had Michael Fisher as our stylist for the day. And he killed it with all the amazing clothes he brought!

I decided to start pretty simple…in a corner…..

Ethan worked the Hell outta that corner…

For a second look, we set up against one of the rusty sliding doors…

…and Michael had the perfect retro outfit for the mood…

Michael had a rack full of extremely nice suits just begging to be used, so for our final shots, we went with a simple, dark seamless…

…and I let Ethan just play around…

Here’s the cover that came out yesterday…

Thanks to Adam, Michael, the folks at Ruby Bird..and most of all Ethan…it was a cool hang!

Ray Dalio for the London Sunday Times

It’s no exaggeration saying Ray Dalio is a fabulously successful fund manager. His investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, is among the largest hedge funds in the World and he’s personally worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 Billion. I had been offered the chance to shoot him three separate times, but was always booked and had to pass. Then Andrew Mitchell at the London Sunday Times called, and I figured this might be my final opportunity. He had been making the rounds pushing his book, Principles: Life and Work and we were promised ‘a few minutes’ with Ray while he was at a meeting in Manhattan…off we went…

Ever since seeing the Irving Penn show at the Met, I’ve found myself channelling the Master…I’m pulling out the backdrops and firing up the really soft lights more than usual…so Kaz and I set up a little North Light studio off in an area that was under construction of the floor where he had his meeting…

Super simple…just a big, soft 5′ umbrella and a couple of canvas drops…

Ray arrived wearing monochromatic greys and everything just meshed…

Nice, but the Black & White was even more dramatic…

After a few minutes, we quickly switched to another location about 15 feet from the first. It was a painted wall that was due to be demolished shortly, but would be perfect as a backdrop for a second portrait…

A little color and contrast tweaking, and we were ready to go…

Here’s how things looked in the Times of London…

I Shot Mr. Post-It® Note For The London Sunday Times

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So I get a call from Andrew Mitchell, one of the photo editors at the London Sunday Times, and he needed me to hightail it to the Palace Hotel to shoot a feature on George Buckley, the Chairman & CEO of 3M. Now the Palace is a really nice hotel, but the idea of shooting a couple of portraits in his suite just kinda seemed flat, so after a bit of pleading with the hotel’s P/R people, they said if I was quick I could use the Gilt Bar as a studio. So Kaz and I packed up the van and made our way uptown, but not before making a stop at an Office Depot for some props. You see, 3M makes more than 55,000 products, including adhesives, abrasives, laminates, fire protection, dental products, electronic materials, medical products, polishes, waxes, car shampoo, car chassis rust protection, electronic circuits and optical films. But if you had to pick the one thing they make that everybody knows, it’s the Post-It® Note, and I bought almost every Post-It® Note on the shelf at that Office Depot! I had been to Gilt a few times and I had an idea to dress up the ultra-modern lounge area with a few (thousand) of the little paper stickies…

Kaz sits in for the first test…

…about half an hour later, after Post-It-ing the set…

…and the final image of George…

For a second photo, we turned 90 degrees to the left and set up a shot with George framed by a golden wall and warm lights…

The gold wall…

A nice start…

That was nice, George…but what do you say we try this…

Dont’cha just love it when the CEO of a HUGE multinational corporation has a sense of humor?!!

So Mikhail Baryshnikov Says To Me…

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That’s right…Baryshinkov! I can’t help but love my job, but when I get to meet some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with, even I hafta to step back from time to time and ask myself…really?!!

I’ve done a few gigs lately for the London Sunday Times, so when photo editor Sean McKillop called and asked if I wanted to shoot Mikhail Baryshnikov and his wife Lisa Rinehart up at their country house for the weekend ‘Home’ magazine, I didn’t skip a beat before saying yes. The couple was selling the centuries-old converted barn they’ve lived in since 1981 and I was there to not only get a few portraits of them, but also as many views of the house as possible. The only problem…Misha’s schedule was extremely limited and I would have no more than half an hour with the two of them. Of course, the Times wanted ‘four or five’ portrait situations, never mind that on the day we were to shoot it was about 38 degrees and pouring rain!

After a whirlwind tour of the house, we started by lighting what would be the cover image of the two of them at the front door to the house…

…..then very quickly set up two additional portraits in the sunroom (bathed in clouds)…

…and in front of a fireplace in the original part of the house…

With his part of the performance over, Misha bid us good day and I then got off a photo of Lisa relaxing with one of the many cats that share the house with them…

With the portraits out of the way, we then went about shooting as many detail shots as possible…

Thanks to Sean for the gig and thank you Misha & Lisa for allowing me the opportunity to spend a bit of time with you…