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I’ve been shooting a lot lately for Eric Godwin at Bloomberg Markets, and a month ago he had us make a couple of trips down to D.C. to shoot Mary Schapiro, the head of the Securities & Exchange Commission, and her Chief Enforcement investigator, Robert Khuzami. Between the time they spend testifying in front of congress and chasing down the bankers who caused the current financial crisis, these two are so busy that I was warned I was going to be getting very little time to shoot. For Mary, I had to come away with at least two situations, one of them a cover try. After scouring a building filled with official looking seals and crests on the walls, we settled on the SEC hearing room for the cover….
Kaz and Ben knock off a few test frames…
Kaz and the MacBeth chart…
Try to look like you mean business…!!!
…and the final result…..
With the first shot in the bag (taking all of about 5 minutes!) we raced over to the slightly bizarre press conference area that was in the hallway outside. It had a wonderfully blank look about it, so we lit it with a very direct, blank light…
Lighting was just an open-faced Octalight for an overall fill and a bare head to throw a direct, hard shadow…
Total time with Mary…maybe 15 minutes…and then it was back to New York……but the very next day Eric called and said we had to go back! He just found out that they needed Robert Khuzami shot as well. OK…pack up the van and off we go again…..
Now I actually knew quite a bit about Khuzami before we got back down to D.C. He is probably best-known as the Federal Prosecutor in the trial of the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdel-Rahman, and he’s equally respected for the convictions he’s gotten in numerous insider trading, fraud and organized crime cases. But I was immediately struck by was a nice, normal guy he was…and he had his kids art up on his office wall right next to his law enforcement mementoes and courtroom drawings of him in action. So that’s where we shot him, using the same kind of lighting we used on the second shot of Mary…
One final shot of me with the Commissioner…
Damn Ugly Photography 