Beast Mode: ON

King of Cocky-town

Powerful

Headshots:  I love the crap out of headshots.  Why? Well they’re easy for one.  And they often receive wayyy more attention from the client after you’re done.  One of the things that makes me happiest in life is seeing one of my photos show up as someone’s default profile picture, if even for just a moment.

Once defaulted, my picture is now shared with their friends, family and significant others.  It’s showing up in search engines and being used by spammers to sell Viagra.  MY WORK is helping score Nigerians blank checks from idiots in Middle America!

Sweet.

So anyway, this headshots shoot here was hella fun.  Chris is truly one of the easiest people to work with.  We shot around, took breaks, shot again.  No rush (It was Sunday after all) and what we had to show for it was high quality.  Now, for a while Chris and I had been talking about enhancing his profile online, and he had alot of great ideas for the direction he wanted to take.  But in the end, though we shot with those outcomes in mind, what ended up being his favorite was not what he thought he wanted.

I really can’t explain the phenomenon except to say that since photography is art, it speaks to you before it has been created, during and also after in the post-processing phase.  Photographers, despite knowing what their client wants, and despite supplying them with what they think will fullfil that vision… photographers seem to consistently find a way to leave their mark on the end product.  Sometimes the mark is quite profound! The artist inside cannot be stifled!  And so it was that the shots which I took artistic license with ended up being the ones which excited him most, spurring a mini-reinvention even!

So needless to say I’m stoked.  I hope you enjoyed these photos (especially the first one which is my favorite as well as Chris’).  If you’d like to learn more about Chris McCombs, the talented Rockstar of the fitness marketing world, please check out his website, www.kickbacklife.com.  There’s alot of great marketing info on there for personal trainers, bootcamp instructors and studio owners, to name a few.

If you didn’t know him, you might think that “Big” Will Robertson is a street fighter or strongman in the circus, but to those people Will responds “Man, I’m just a big ‘ol Teddy Bear!”

And he is really.  One of the nicest dudes I’ve ever had the pleasure of shooting with/for.  The photo shoot we did to promote his amazing gym in Costa Mesa, CA called Wardance Training Center went off without a hitch due mostly to his ability to keep everyone entertained.  He was hustling back and forth.  First I saw him over with the girls helping them get clothes picked out…then he was off in a corner with a client, then back to ask me if I needed anything.  Amazing energy, that guy.

So as for the shoot, we didn’t do any subtle marketing; this guy’s gym is one giant piece of marketing any way you turn!  It’s absolutely amazing in terms of size and punchy color scheme.  On one wall there’s even a giant mural with their logo which draws the eye like no other.  So our general goal this day was to get some quality photos of three girls using the gym equipment or being trained by Will.  I believe the photos were going to be used on their website and maybe on their facebook as well.  While we were shooting, we also incorporated “Brock the Cock” into the session.  Brock is a stuffed rooster who serves as the gym’s official mascot.  I confess, I about died laughing photographing Will with his umm Rooster.  Will has no problem running through hilarious pose after hilarious pose.  This is seriously the kind of fun shoot you hope every shoot to be like.  Which is why I was more than happy to agree to shoot their calendar next month!

Anyway, hope you enjoy the photos.  The three girls are Mikaela Tachick – white/blnd hair, Miya Taylor – white/dark hair and Erica Curry – black/black hair.  Despite varying degrees of experience, these girls are an absolute dream to work with individually or in a group like they were.  They had so much energy I had to hustle to keep up!

This isn’t really a full review since I missed the first half of the webinar, but I think I caught enough of it to report that it was quite informative and entertaining to boot.

Background: Drew Gardner is an award-winning London based photographer.  His latest work was a series of shots of animals and people called “The Forest” which fall in a category he calls “Epic Fashion.”

Drew has this to say about “The Forest”:

Inspired by the realism and romance of the Pre-Raphaelite art of the 1800′s, this series explores our relationship with the environment, and sets out to challenge our perceptions of seemingly “dangerous” or “safe” scenarios.

Personally I really dig this series.  My favorite photo is a shot of a girl and zebra running through the forest together.  As of this post it’s not on his website and I don’t have a screenshot to show you, but it’s a really nice action shot.  Were it me I would have painted the Zebra like a Unicorn, but that’s the fantasy enthusiast in me getting carried away.  I don’t really have a good answer for why a Zebra would be in a forest (hence the Unicorn), but trust me it does nothing to detract from the feelings raised by the image and this shot definitely makes the eye move, which I imagine was one goal of the setup.  Drew actually said that the editing isn’t done for that photo yet but when it is I imagine he will post it on his website here.

My second favorite photo is this one of a girl surrounded by pigs.  As you can see above, the pigs (one pig, several positions) are rooting around in the scrub, possibly looking for truffles (that’s something pigs do right?).  One pig isn’t interested in forest treats; he is more interested in inspecting the girl’s foot, which Drew assured us was clean without getting into particulars.
But my interest wasn’t piqued so much by the pigs as it was by the girl’s posture.  To me, this photo evokes the image of a woman left suddenly by a lover, jilted, but more sad than angry.  In her hand there is a small red/gold unidentifiable object…perhaps a keepsake from her lover, or a vial of poison with which to end her life, who knows.  Drew said this picture cost £400 for the pig alone which he rented for this shot (that and the pig handler’s time no doubt).  The fog in the picture was created using a smoke bomb and he had to time it right because it would shift all over the place depending on the wind.  The forest in the image is in Poland.  Drew says that when deciding which forest to shoot in, he’s found it to be far better to deal with private forests because then you’re only dealing with one person.

On the subject of cost, he indicated that the elephant used in the shot above cost nearly £10,000 and continues to haunt his bank balance.  I heard somewhere that renting an elephant for a day in the US would cost you $50,000.  Lucky for Drew, this picture was shot in Thailand, home to 2,000 elephants in the tourism sector, so the elephant probably didn’t have to travel far, cutting down on cost.
One interesting point I took away about the execution of this photo: There was a huge waterfall just behind Drew which made communicating with the model very difficult.  And if you’re worried about the safety of the model, worry not! There was a handler just behind the elephant the whole time making sure he behaved .

Unfortunately I missed alot of the conversation on the fog he used in his shots, but when referring back to it, Drew’s major point to people trying this for themselves was to make sure there’s no wind to carry your atmosphere away.  The photo above would have been far different without the fog to filter the light (all natural light).

Now on to the infrared photography.  Drew gave a sneak peek of some photos he shot in the invisible spectrum using the Phase One Achromatic Plus Back, the workings of which are beyond me.  Suffice to say Drew considers it tricky photography to play with since you are forced to use a filter on your lens which blocks out all visible light, leaving you with no thru-camera view to shape your shot. He said that his work with infrared was all trial-and-error because you really don’t know how much light there is out there in the IR spectrum before you start shooting it.  I’m out of my element discussing this topic so I’ll just stop typing and show you the photos I screenshot:

Drew closed his Webinar with an appeal for fans to purchase his “Location Lighting w/Drew Gardner” DVD and he also has a series coming out called “Drew Gardner’s Behind the Photos” which is a subset of a Bui Brothers series in which Drew will select a photo and talk about how he created it.

Use the form below to keep up to date on this series…if you buy the whole series it’s £50 and if you ask him nicely he will probably give you the 10% discount code he gave to the Webinar attendees.

For more information on Drew Gardner and to see The Forest Series, please visit his website at: http://www.drew.it/