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July in Christmas

Wednesday December 30th, 2009

Yes, you read that correctly. People sometimes refer to “Christmas in July,” and I’m proposing the opposite, especially with today’s 20-something-degree weather in the northeast United States. In that spirit we have a recent beach project to warm the toes:

The subject is Cindy Cohen, the winner of the television show “She’s Got the Look” who, according to her website, “beat‐out thousands of women all over the country, walking away with the grand prize of $100,000, a contract with Wilhelmina Models and a photo spread in SELF Magazine. The TV Land series, hosted by supermodel Kim Alexis, sets out to discover sophisticated, beautiful, and confident women all competing to be the next great supermodel over the age of thirty‐five.”

SELF Magazine hired Los Angeles photography duo Larsen & Talbert to photograph Cindy, as they had shot for the magazine before and seemed the right fit. Here’s a link to a little behind the scenes video on TV Land’s website, if you’re curious. And the final tearsheet at right, below:

Michael Larsen (his wife is Tracy Talbert, the other half of the creative team) said that two tv crews also covered the shoot, one from TV Land and the other from Extra. I asked if that was commonplace for his shoots, as he also photographs a lot of celebrities. These are his thoughts:

The video crews have become standard place on most celebrity photoshoots these days. Sometimes it’s the magazine shooting for their web site and mostly it’s the entertainment news programs that will do pieces on the shoot. It gives them a context or a reason to run a story on a particular celeb. Most of the time they don’t cause any problems and they only stay for a portion of the shoot. Sometimes, however, they can cause the celebrity to become overly guarded so as not to allow any unwanted soundbites to get out Or, since they are used to playing to a motion camera, they’ll spend too much time with the video crew at the expense of the photoshoot time. When I’m told that the magazine wants to have video I always ask them to clarify for themselves which team has priority on the shoot. Since it’s almost always the still side, I then ask them to make that clear to the video crew. If there is a producer on the job, it becomes part of their job to wrangle the video crew and make sure that they don’t interfere with what we need to do on the still side. I appreciate that magazines use these opportunities to cross promote with the entertainment news programs to help boost magazine sales and the celebrity publicists like killing two birds with one shoot. It’s just a new part of the game and for the most part I don’t mind and I even try to help them out whenever possible, as long as I am getting what I need.

Here are a few celebrity photos by Larsen & Talbert. The first is one of my favorites of William Shatner:

And a moment with Taylor Swift (L&T did a funny email promo with her and Kanye West when they had their flap):

And I think that Larsen & Talbert do a nice job of making people look comfortable, even when the subjects are looking right at the camera. I realize that’s what most photographers are trying to do, but it’s not easy. Here’s some of their work in that vein: