Yesterday afternoon, I did some promotional photographs for “Insecurity,” a new musical by Mickey Zetts appearing at the Midtown International Theater Festival. I’ve known Mickey for a long time now, and he’s just an immensely talented perfromer and songwriter. Most importantly, he has the good sense to cast my beautiful and talented wife Paula in his show.
Having a 2 1/2 year-old child, Paula and I tend to “trade off” on creative opportunities. So getting me to shoot shots for a show my wife is in is difficult at best. The “Suckers” shot involved an on-site babysitter (thanks, Tesse!) and so did this one (thanks, Tania!). Thankfully, Benjamin was very, very good this time around, and even napped for a while! Miracle!
Where this shoot differed from the last one, though, is that we had to get a few… provocative… shots. Nothing explicit, of course, but it’s kind of hard to say, “Bend over a little more” and “show some more cleavage” when your wife and son are in the room. Thankfully, I have a wonderfully understanding wife, and a child engrossed in watching “Wall-E.”
As always, the rest of the Insecurity photo shoot can be found on Flickr.
Last week, I shot some headshots for Fiona Choi. Fiona’s an actress, a friend, and the mother of Anton, Benjamin’s very bestest best friend in the entire whole-wide world. She brought along her own makeup artist, Segal Yehudai, who did an absolutely spectacular job. Of course, she did so spectacular a job that you can’t see her work!
In preparation for this shot and the “Suckers” shots I did just before, I picked up a new 53″ octagonal softbox, and I must admit that I’m completely in love with it. It’s effect is much more pronounced in the “Suckers” shots, where its soft light just brings up the mysterious foreground ever so slightly, but it’s beautiful light is just money for headshots as well. I just threw on a rim/hair/accent light in the back and I was good to go.
In other photography news, a photo of mine of the new Citi Field was used in the Schmap New York Guide. It was a quickie shot I took with my iPhone while I was taking a long walk down Astoria Boulevard in Queens. And judging from the page, about eight million other people’s photos were also used, but their terms of use were fair, and ain’t nothing wrong with free publicity from a nothing-from-nothing cell phone shot.
Yesterday, insane tech geek that I am, I got a new iPhone 3GS. I must admit, that the better camera is one of the big selling points. The best camera you can get is the one that’s always with you.
No, I don’t mean that I conned some people into shooting for them. I mean I shot some promotional shots today for “Suckers” the latest play written by my brilliant and prolific playwright friend Duncan Pflaster. Duncan also had the very good sense to cast my wife in a leading role, which only further endears me to him.
“Suckers” is a comedy about vampires, so I wanted to go with kind of a spooky, dark, hard light. The purple curtains in the rehearsal room we shot in were nice, since they made the atmosphere lush and dark but not just plain black. This shot of the whole cast (at least, the members of the cast who could make the photo call) just makes me unbearably giddy.
The rest of the Suckers photos can be found here.
