Monday January 25th, 2010
For the third straight year, the Golden Globes presented its award for Best Television Series – Drama to the show portraying advertising industry culture in the ’60′s. The show has also become a perennial favorite for modern day ad folk and photographers.
Benjamin Reed‘s image above has become a favorite as well for PDN, as they use the photo to promote their upcoming Faces portrait contest. Benjamin was with the Los Angeles Times when he photographed several of the show’s stars, though he’s now based in Portland, OR.
Being fans of Mad Men, we asked Benjamin what it was like shooting on a period-era set.
Benjamin:
I was given this assignment and I had no idea what Mad Men was. I heard the show won something in the Golden Globes but that was it. You can’t tell people that these days, everyone knows about the show now because it keeps racking up awards every year. The angle of the story was focused on the women in the series.
The set was pretty amazing. That sounds like a cliche’, but you wander around the office setting, or the house and kitchen scenes and it’s impeccably detailed. You see cigarette butts in the ash trays with real ash (at least it looked that way) and kitchen condiments my great grandmother had in her farm house. I remember seeing old LIFE magazines as well, with normal wear and tear that would expect to see in that period. I mean it when I say everything was close to the real deal. You could imagine yourself in that era and literally feel what was like. I imagine you can really appreciate the attention to detail as an actor or actress and feed off of that in your work. January Jones was shot in the kitchen scene, while Christina was shot in Don Draper’s office and Elisabeth Moss in the bedroom.
What I like most about this type of work is shattering my expectations about the subject. You always have an idea of how your subject is going to be and that’s usually based on the persona they create in their work…and 9 times out 10 it’s wrong. The interesting thing about this particular shoot is that I didn’t know who the characters were so I had no preconceived notion of what to expect. You could talk to them just like normal people and they were very warm and genuinely interested in helping you get the best shot. When they moved into character after makeup and wardrobe they became different people entirely, and that was just with body language. I watched the show for the first time later that week and became hooked.
Our Los Angeles photography team Larsen & Talbert rounds out our cast photo lineup with their portrait for Reader’s Digest. The only difference is that this shot is of the actor Jon Hamm, who plays the show’s lead, Don Draper. It’s interesting to see him off-set and not all slicked-up.
And of course we’ve already blogged about our man in Austin, Michael Thad Carter‘s Mad Men-inspired work, which also made its way into our recent Communication Arts ad:
Personally, my wife and I only started watching the show in 2009 on Netflix, so I’m still waiting to see season 3 on DVD. Please don’t tell me what happens yet, because I’m hooked, too.
-Neil Binkley
Thursday December 31st, 2009
Safe to say that Times Square is the international symbol of New Year’s Eve. So our last post before 2010 shows a few images from the epicenter of the passing of time. These first two are from New York native Landon Nordeman’s series for Time Magazine:
And Rush Varela’s photograph was illuminated several stories above Times Square on one of those fancy monitors for Hype’s fashion campaign:
Another image from the same campaign, though shot in his “backyard” of Los Angeles:
Happy New Year’s, everyone! From a practical perspective, I hope you don’t have to spend it with the toursists in Times Square tonight.
-Neil Binkley
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:
Happy July in Christmas!
-Neil Binkley
