Several months ago I had the rare and unexpected privilege of photographing one of Japan’s most recognisable icons – certainly its most famous musician, Yazawa Eikichi. Just to give you non-Japanese guys an idea, he’s a bit like Bruce Springsteen in that he’s been around for decades, is old-school yet constantly active and has a major (seriously, major) following both young and old. Certainly someone that you don’t get access to all the time.
So anyway the brief for this particular shoot was to get three different shots in an HMV record store, one for a double spread with room for text, one for the cover and a headshot for inside. I guess I don’t really need to mention that the allotted time for a celebrity of this guy’s stature that the allotted time was 10 minutes. This kind of thing is par for the course on shoots like this, so it’s really up to you to figure out how best to allocate your time so everything runs smoothly.
First things first in this process, just to make sure there aren’t any nasty surprises on the day – we went to go look at the location and see what we could figure out. Here are some of the test shots to see what kind of framing they wanted. As you can see…well, it’s a record shop alright, and not a particularly photogenic one. No surprises there, but no pleasant surprises either. Pretty much just what I expected.
Next step – figure out what you can do with what you’ve got. In this case I had a bunch of people in tow who had veto-rights to anything I suggested, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s something you have to work with, not against. The shot I proposed below was initially accepted, then vetoed, then accepted again over the course of a week, but it’s something that I’ve learned to understand as part of the job.
Anyway, as you can see there are a bunch of different types of light sources mixing, playing havoc with my white-balance, and there is a lot of visual junk everywhere, which works for teenagers with an attention-span deficit, but not so much for photographs of an iconic Japanese figure. I knew my biggest challenge would be lighting and photographing the place so it didn’t look like junk in the photos. Once I have those things figured out I can more or less relax and concentrate on thinking about what I want to say to him.
So – how to make an unpalatable location a little easier for your camera to swallow? Firstly – deal with the visual junk. Usually I don’t have much say in what I can move around, but this time we were accommodating a huge star so I had the power (RAWR) to rearrange the place as much as I wanted. Pretty cool. We planned to remove everything superfluous and replace the rest with CD jackets and posters as part of the setup. Luckily the editorial team was on it and managed to get a hold of several hundred CD cases and photocopied jackets by the date of the shoot. We arrived two hours before the subject’s scheduled arrival and began tearing the place down.
Next; figuring out the lighting. None of the store’s ambient lighting was suitable to be used in the final shot (way too difficult to color correct), so I ended up building each shot from the ground up with strobe. Nothing groundbreaking, but I wanted to know exactly what the setup for each of the three shots would be so I could move through them quickly, if it came to that.
The issue for the shot below was lighting it for depth, as well as the foreground (of course, he has to wear all black, which doesn’t do me any favours). Solution: backlighting – two strobes firing straight back at the camera, providing separation light for Yazawa-san, as well as helping add some depth to the photo. You’ll notice they were gelled orange and blue – I figured that since he’s a rockstar it would suit the scene and the subject to mimic some colored stage-lighting. Rock and roll, right?
Light on Yazawa Eikichi: PCB Einstein with 30 degree grid and Profoto D1 shooting through Lastolite diffusor for fill. This one was for the cover.
We whizzed through the headshot below – all we did was move him to the back of the shop, bringing our gridded Einstein and using the blue-gelled light from the previous shot.
For the last shot, we used – you guessed it – the same gridded Einstein plus a ring flash for fill light. I composited the left hand billboard in afterwards, seeing as we didn’t really have enough time to get it in-camera with the record company execs kind of standing around and tapping their wristwatches. I like this variant the best – it’s a little quirky and kind of humorous, which is something I like to have in my portraits.
All of it was over in a flash, 1o minutes literally had to be 10 minutes, but good preparation, a solid plan and no nasty surprises helped us all get through the photoshoot with no tears (never cried at a photoshoot yet). It’s imperative to know exactly what you want to do for a quick editorial shoot for this (or, at least *look* like you know what you’re doing), otherwise it’ll drag on, people will hate you, get anxious to leave and you may not get everything you need, which is a tough situation to explain yourself out of.
Here’s a BTS (thanks Mijonju!) of me behind the camera. Is that an Orbis ring flash? Heck yeah baby! Thumbs up for photographing celebrities with a ring flash adaptor! Also, if you’re curious, the camera is a D800 with a 24-70mm. Gosh I’m starting to get a double chin…
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