Look ma, no Photoshop!
For those that are new to my blog, I teach an online class with the BPSOP, and I conduct my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops all over our (round) planet.
I was shooting film a million years ago when the name Adobe was a type of house in the Southwest part of the US…in other words before Photoshop when everything had to be done in the camera. Here’s one of my stories:
I was hired by Leo Burnett Advertising to shoot a series of ads in Scotland. One of the ads featured two fishing buddies exchanging their secret fly-fishing locations.
While we were shooting the others, I sent a location scout out to find an authentic Scottish Pub…a location I thought would be easy considering where we were; I was so wrong. After spending a couple of days, the scout came up empty.
At that point we extending the search to find a room that would fit the layout. We found a back room in a private boy’s prep school that would work but would require a lot of stying.
We all went out looking for stuff that had a fishing theme and found exactly what we needed…we began to convert the room into a ‘Scottish Pub’. That’s when it went downhill.
The headmaster came in to see what we were doing and at that point said that since the wood paneling was over seven hundred years old, and we weren’t allowed to touch it, he just wanted to know how we were going to do it. It was like being run over by the business end of an Amtrak train (express with no stops).
Acting quickly and purely out of desperation, an idea came to me. We ran over to the nearest fishing store and purchased enough twenty-pound monofilament line to reach across the entire country.
So everything you see on the wall is not actually touching, but is suspended down from hooks mounted on the ceiling and is approx. 1/8th to 1/4 of an inch in front of it. It’s what you had to do when Photoshop was years away from being invented. You had to shoot everything in the camera.
The men had never seen each other before that day. We went out in the street and recruited these two you see in the photo. The reason that they look like old friends exchanging their secret fly-fishing spots was that being realistic, I had them actually drinking Dewars. In this photo, they are so drunk that we had to hire private cars to take each one of them home.
FYI, this photo was lit with one 12K HMI out the window and a large roll of white seamless between the camera and the men.
Here’s the room before we started:
Visit my website at www.joebaraban.com, check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
