So this is my first video post, and hopefully the first of many to come. I’ve been meaning to post a “what’s in my bag” video for some time now and finally locked myself in my room, set up a floor lamp, flip cam, moved around some furniture and began shooting. The limitations of the size of my dorm room made positioning the camera a little difficult, but I made do with what I had. Interestingly enough, the black table in the video is actually the top of my mini-fridge. Whatever work, ey?
So why did I shoot a “what’s in the bag” video?
A photographer’s camera bag is essentially a bag of gadgets and gizmos accrued over time that help define and capture a photographer’s style of photography. My current set up is very simple, but at the same time it’s extremely powerful. I created this video to serve as a resource and show aspiring photographers that a basic setup like mine can produce the types of images you see in my portfolio. I currently shoot using a D90, which is a prosumer level dSLR, a single 24-70mm lens and a few strobes. The point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need 10′s of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to take beautiful photographs. If you’re looking to get serious about photography and you don’t really know where to start, my suggestion would be the following: Get your hands mid-level dSLR body used or new (perhaps a d80), a 50mm nikkor 1.8/f lens, two Vivitar 285′s, and a set of Cactus 4-Channel Wireless Flash Triggers. For around a $1000 you can have a comparable camera setup to mine, and start taking pictures with off-camera flashes. Everything else that you saw in the video is just icing on the cake.
It’s been a long couple of months leading up to a single night. Spring WILD, one of two concerts at Washington University in St. Louis, was originally scheduled to start at 4:15 P.M. with our main acts, Shwayze and Cold War Kids, performing at 5:45 and 7:30 P.M., but due to poor weather (tornado warnings, heavy showers + thunderstorms) Team31 (the student group responsible for putting on WILD) decided to move the acts up and end the show by 7:00 P.M.
The result? An amazing example of how quickly word can spread around campus. Through Twitter, Facebook, the Team 31 site, e-mail, texts, and phone calls, students were quickly notified of the time change for the night’sline-up.
Expecting the worst I spent 25 minutes before the show waterproofing my gear with gaffers tape and garbage bags only to find out that it wouldn’t start raining till 8:00 P.M. The timing of the event was perfect , and the acts killed their sets!
For the days leading up to WILD, I thought it would be interesting to work on a non-traditional promotional project to get students excited about the Cold War Kids and Shwayze. I ended up creating a remote controlled robot that played music named Jukebox Junior. It took two days to design, build and paint. Running for 6 hours over the course of 3 days, I believe I went through 40 AA batteries.
Two week ago I had the opportunity to shoot, Common, AKA Lonnie Lynn at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at WUSTL.
For this assignment I brought my strobes with me as usual. Once I got the “okay” from his publicist to set up lights, I quickly scrambled to set up two Vivitars at 1/16 just to add a little more light to the scene. Once I started taking a few test shots I realized my white balance was completely off and that the strobes were making my shots look boring and flat. It’s been such a long time since I last shot without strobes that I forgot pictures could be taken without flash! Unfortunately, since I was shooting without strobes, I had to bump the ISO to 800. I normally shoot with controlled lighting and keep it at 200, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the D90 was able to keep the noise to a minimum especially in the darker regions where I expected to see some purplish pixilation.
For the first time in a long time, I approached a client. Yesterday afternoon I contacted Noah A.K.A. Xaphoon Jones of Chiddy Bang to see if they were interested in hiring me to design their album cover for their new mixtape, Air Swell. Sure enough they were, so I set off to work and finally came up with the design featured above.
It’s a very clean and simple concept especially for a mixtape, and I was afraid they wouldn’t like it, but it was getting late and I decided to email it off to Xaphoon to get critiqued.
The next morning Xaphoon contacted me and told me he loved the design. To my surprise I checked out the fan page around 2 A.M. and saw that he had posted the album cover for everyone to see. Within 6 hours, 115 people liked the image and 22 people posted comments!
There’s obviously alot of excitement and anticipation building for this release, and I’m glad that I was able to contribute to it.
I sent Xaphoon an email about a really solid promotional idea that I think would take Chiddy Bang to the next level. Hopefully I’ll wake up tomorrow to an e-mail telling me to run with the idea.
If you’ve been living under a rock and have no idea who these guys are, I strongly suggest you visit their myspace page and give them a listen.
They actually just released a track off of Air Swell a few days ago. It’s a remix of Ellie Goulding’s “Under the Sheets.”Click here to hear it now.
Visionlab Studios is a video production company operating out of both Boston and New York City. They brought me on as a graphic consultant to give their brand a complete facelift. Over the past couple of months we have been communicating through Facebook to redesign a new logo, business card and website. The guys over at Visionlab Studios have produced some really solid work over the past couple of months, and I can’t wait to see what they have in store for the summer!
Within 6 hours, 115 people liked the image and 22 people posted comments!
