Red Studios Hollywood, the historic Ren Mar lot was home to productions including I Love Lucy, The Jack Benny Show, I Spy, Hogan’s Heroes and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
I’m off to Red Studios in Hollywood for three days. I’ll get to work with the Epic and Scarlet and I’m sure there will be other really interesting stuff going on.
Red Epic
We invited friend of the studio Daniel Castro to shoot a fashion test here at The Foundry studio a few weeks ago. While he and his team were here I shot a few minutes of behind the scenes video with my “toy” camera the Panasonic GF1. Take a look and see a whole new side of the Foundry Studio.
I’m not much for tech talk but I thought I’d start posting items about some of the tools we use here in our studio. A few months ago I started worrying that the grey card I use to set white balance was discolored. I looked online to see about a replacement. I happened to find the X-Rite Color-checker Passport on Amazon.com. $99 seemed ridiculous for a grey card, but I thought the integration with Light Room seemed intriguing. Now that I have it I wish I had one from the first day I bought a digital camera. We’ve been calibrating scanners and monitors for years. That it took this long to start calibrating the digital camera, in hindsight, seems crazy.
Setting Profile in Adobe Light Room
The color checker provides the same functions as a good grey-card for white balance. What makes it so brilliant is it also includes software to create a DMG table which replaces the Adobe Standard profile in the camera raw converter. Essentially it tells the converter how to convert different colors. The difference is remarkable for saturated reds and blues. We now shoot the Passport in each lighting scenario and then I use Lightroom to set white balance and camera profile before I do anything else to the files.
File straight from Canon 1ds MKIII with white balance set for Strobe
File with X-rite profile enabled
File with camera profile and white balance set.
Notice in particular the reds and blues and the stronger delineation between colors in the slur gauge on the left side. For some pictures the effects of the profile are hardly noticeable, for images with strong colors the difference can be like throwing a light switch.
Color profile set for Adobe ACR 4.4
Custom Profile
In my opinion if you care about color you need to be using this tool for every shoot, btw I have no relationship with X-Rite. There is a video tutorial here.
This might be the cutest thing you’ve ever seen: Here is Mr. Fox Takes A Nap:
Introducing the adorable Zero and rambunctious Velcro: I had the great fortune to be the first photographer to work with two brand new talents in the industry. Zero, a beautiful Arctic Fox and Velcro the wide-eyed Ring-Tailed Lemur. I’ve been working on an Animal Portrait portfolio for years, I just had the amazing opportunity to photograph an 18-foot Reticulated Python named Lemondrop for California Academy of Sciences. I love making portraits of animals so I’m actively looking for new subjects and clients who share my interest.
The Fantastic Mr. Zero
Velcro the ring-tailed lemur
I found out on Facebook that Bowwow Productions were here in town working with my friends Jennifer Bullock and Tom Hood, they were doing a shoot with a big adorable St. Barnard, but they were traveling with two fresh young faces who had never been in a real shoot before. It was an opportunity for me not only to photograph two of the cutest animals, but to meet and work with Stephanie and Judy from Bowwow. I’m so happy it worked out, it was great fun for everyone and I’m very happy with these new additions to my collection of animal portraits. Check out Winokur Photography to see more photos of Zero and Velcro.
Zero is an Arctic Fox - Vulpes lagopus
There is something about a studio-portrait of an animal that I find endlessly fascinating. The thing is, and this is true for much of my work, by removing every element except the subject and the relationship between the viewer and the subject, we create an image that allows us to believe in a personal connecting with the sitter. An introduction if you will. Photographs of these animals in the wild can certainly be beautiful and fascinating, but by photographing them in a neutral setting we have the opportunity to focus on their eyes, expression and body language. These are character studies just like the portraits of people I make.
I knew it would be huge fun to have a fox and a lemur in my studio, so I recruited my brother, Stephan, to shoot some video while we worked. I edited his footage and put together this 2 minute video showing us working with Stephanie and Judy of Bowwow Productions:
This coming Thursday 8/18 presents you with a great opportunity to meet two San Francisco celebrities: Lemondrop and Adam Savage from Myth Busters. It’s comedy nightlife at the California Academy of Sciences. If you haven’t already seen Lemondrop you can check him out in this video from our shoot with him. Meanwhile I’m actively looking for more cool animals to photograph. So, if you happen to know someone who has a Long Nosed Bandicoot or a Rainbow Lorikeet let them know I’m interested in photographing all kinds of cool and interesting creatures.
I wanted to work with Yoga Journal from the time I started my own yoga practice. As soon as I was introduced to Yoga I became creatively inspired by the strength, beauty and grace of the practice. I began seeking out yogis to photograph. Like dancers yogis have an awareness of their bodies that makes them a pleasure to photograph. Last December, after pestering Creative Director, Charli Ornett and Art Director, Ron Escobar for some time I was given my first assignment for the magazine.
Since December we have worked together regularly – except a brief hiatus after my knee surgery. It should be no surprise that the team from a magazine like Yoga Journal is an absolute pleasure to work with and have in the studio. The shoots are busy and we have a lot to produce each day but it feels more like having friends visit then a busy production day. Since December we’ve worked on projects for the section Home Practice, two feature stories and a video.
This video, an interview with yoga instructor, Kia Miller was a last minute request from the magazine. I had worked on several video projects but hadn’t shot lip-synch sound before. Since I didn’t trust the 5d for audio I ran around and pulled together a mixer and wireless mic in time for the shoot. Any photographer who considers film-making of interest should begin paying close attention to sound in film and take sound as seriously as pictures in their motion projects. Audio mixing is one of the next things on my self-education to-do list.
Most of the time I am looking for the moment. Dancing with a subject finding the best way to express an idea. Because YJ wants to show perfect yoga poses the methodology of their shoots is unique. We have to show the perfect expression of each pose. Conceptually, It’s as if our whole team is doing the pose together breathing into it, finding the right depth and angle. The picture is that moment when we were all in tune on that same breath.
“Enjoy the simple things.” It’s a cliché. The kind of unwanted advice you get when you’re fighting with the big things. However once you realize that something small gives you a tickle of pleasure, like a warm welcome home from your cat or dog, it can be amazingly satisfying to pay that little moment an undue amount of attention. This concept grew into the film project I’m debuting here. No spoilers, but this is the first in a series of shorts called Life’s Small Pleasures. It’s about one of the little things we enjoy in our home. Please take 2 minutes to watch, we had a great time making this and learned a lot on the way. If you like it I hope you’ll share this link with your friends.
For me making new work isn’t just a small pleasure. It’s where my energy and happiness come from. As a result I’m always looking for my next project. Life’s Small Pleasures came to me one day while I was watching the structure of broadcast commercials. Isn’t that a great way of saying I was “working” when I was really watching TV? From that moment I started figuring out how to execute it. Like most photographers I’m always pushing myself creatively and technically. Lately that means exploring motion and learning the tools and techniques of that media.
This short film was a personal project. I was the producer, director, editor and chief instigator but I didn’t do it alone.
Film-making requires a team. We keep our crew small, tight and nimble. For this project I had help from the start from my friends at Artist Untied. Artist Representative Samantha Sommatino and I talked about the idea and she suggested stylists I could work with. Then CEO and Creative Director Jon Lucca got involved, he provided invaluable support. Artist Untied put Ken Baldwin on the project, he not only worked on props and wardrobe but he took the lead on casting. Renee Rael provided hair and makeup styling. I brought in my usual crew including Mike Blumenfeld (gaffer / assistant) and Chrysta Giffen (retoucher / colorist). This is partly because I love working with them and also because I want my motion production to run hand in hand with my still productions. I want my crew to be as comfortable changing production hats as I am.
The shoot:
By the time we had the video production moving forward and knew what location and talent would be required it was clear that we would be well-served to combine a still lifestyle project with the film production. This is what clients are requesting so why not do the same for ourselves. What we didn’t do was try to shoot still and video at the same time. Each art-form has its own creative and technical needs. By breaking the shoot into two distinct days we allowed each its own physical and mental space. Though camera and lighting tools are merging in ways that allow still and motion to come from the same teams and the same equipment each has a different kind of storytelling and directing needs.
We only had one day for the motion project and one for the lifestyle shoot, everyone worked exceptionally hard the results speak for their professionalism and talent.
Creating a film and body of images out of a single stream-lined production exemplifies what I love to do for clients. We are already working on the next “Small Pleasure”
Stay tuned.
New this month on the Yoga Journal website is a video from the Talent Search Winner shoot we did here at Winokur Photography & The Foundry Studio. The video was shot by Lynton Vandersteen and edited by Sarah Kleinman at Yoga Journal. I think I managed to avoid being pictured, except the side of my head, but there is a good shot of my 1st assistant Mike Blumenfeld hard at work with stylists France Pierson and Lyn Heineken.
Enjoy.
Before Thanksgiving last year I got a call that was at once very exciting and also a bit frightening. I have been slowly working on a series I call Animal Portraits. It’s been a project I’ve been interested in for a long time but finding cool and interesting animals to photograph has made for slow progress. The call was from Rhonda Rubinstein at the California Academy of Sciences. She had an animal for me to photograph, a 15-foot-long reticulated python. As Indiana Jones says, “Snakes, why does it have to be snakes.” The snake’s name was Lemondrop – how bad could it be. I decided that this was as good a time as any to get over my irrational phobia and make it work. I couldn’t be happier with that decision, the shoot went really well. You can watch a behind-the-scenes video here:
Lemondrop now lives in “The Hacienda” on the first floor of the Academy. His house is decorated in images from our shoot.
You can see some of the Lemondrop photos and my animal portraits here: Winokur Photography
The show is opening at California Academy of Sciences on May 9, be sure to drop by and say hello to Lemondrop for me. I’m of course thrilled to see my work 20 feet tall on the side of the building. I understand there are also some murals inside too but I haven’t seen them yet.
As always huge thanks to my team especially Chrysta Giffen and Mike Blumenfeld.
My portraits of Concorde Memorabilia collector Nathan Shedroff were in the opening spreads of COLORS ISSUE N° 79 “COLLECTOR” here We learned today that the issue won the Silver Cube at ADC. Here is the release:
COLORS ISSUE N° 79 “COLLECTOR” WINNER OF THE SILVER CUBE at THE ADC 90TH ANNUAL AWARD
Treviso, April 27th, 2011. The Art Directors Club (www.adcglobal.org), the premier organization for creatives in integrated media and the first global creative collective of its kind, announced yesterday the winners of its prestigious ADC 90th Annual Awards.
COLORS “Collector”, the magazine‟s Winter 2010/2011 issue, has obtained the Silver Cube in the Editorial Design Category.
COLORS 79 “Collector” is dedicated to those who amass, categorise and catalogue objects of the same type. They may be collectors of nature, works of art or, in most cases, everyday objects which, because they are rare, distinctive or represent something special, become extraordinary cult objects, steeped in memories that feed passions and obsessions.
True to its tradition as a „magazine that talks about the rest of the world‟, “Collector” seeks to celebrate the diversity of local cultures and of creativity, casting a contemporary eye on tradition and crossing the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, between reality and representation. These objects of desire, refined, coveted and exchanged, thus become the pretext for a journey into the history of design, graphics and industrial production, and at the same time, into the habits, interests and needs of human beings.
COLORS 79 “Collector” is edited by French designer Sam Baron, in collaboration with the design department at FABRICA, which he directs.
COLORS is a quarterly magazine read by young adults across the world. Established in 1991, under the editorship of Oliviero Toscani and Tibor Kalman, with the premise that diversity is positive but that all cultures have equal value, it is sold in over 40 countries and published in four bilingual editions (English + Italian, French, Spanish and Korean).
Pictures are, above all else, COLORS’ expressive medium: a method that is universal and reaches the greatest number of people with a strong, immediate impact. Using this visual language, COLORS’ themes alternate between the challengingly serious, such as ecology, wars around the world, the fight against aids, and the frankly frivolous such as shopping, fashion, and toys.
www.colorsmagazine.com
The Art Directors Club (www.adcglobal.org) is the premier organization for integrated media and the first international creative collective of its kind. Founded in New York in 1920, the ADC is a self-funded, not-for-profit global membership organization serving as a hub for a broad range of creatives including creative directors, art directors, graphic designers, digital designers, environmental designers, copywriters, illustrators, photographers and others. The club‟s mission is to connect creative communications professionals around the globe, and to provoke and elevate world-changing ideas. It focuses on the highest standards of excellence in communications for the industry, and encourages students and young professionals entering the field. ADC provides a forum for creatives in Advertising, Design, Interactive Media and Communications to explore the direction of these rapidly converging industries.
– Congratulations Fabrica!
-Michael
