Behind the scenes shots of our marketing shoot for "The King and I."

Mel Maghuyop as "The King."

I was happy to see "The King and I" on the 2014-2015 season listing at Zach Theatre. It's one of the most enjoyable and visually enchanting musicals from Rodgers and Hammerstein. On a show like this one we'll end up doing two or three different kinds of photographic shoots to help visually charge the marketing. Last week I covered an event that brought in a group of VIPs and donors to see a typical evening rehearsal. No costumes and no full band, but lots of energy and hard work. I was able to capture images of the interplay between the director and the cast. I was also able to get reaction images showing this small audience's appreciation of the details that go into bringing a rich and complex show like this to life. 

On Friday last week we had a fun, little shoot. Just the kind I like. We were able to photograph the two adult leads and one of the lead children, together and separately, for marketing images that Zach Theatre will use on the web and in direct mail (which still seems to be very effective). 

"The King and I" A marketing shot for an upcoming production at Zach Theatre.

We shot against a white background but I spent some time adding color and texture to the background just for fun.

Morning Notes. It's Friday and we're off to a good start.

"It's all about the light."

A scene from 'A Christmas Story' at Zach Theatre

November 2013.

I started my day out walking with the remaining Austin contingent of my family, Belinda and Studio dog. I'd cleaned the studio yesterday and set up a lighting design for a portrait I was hired to shoot, scheduled for this morning. The assignment was to make a portrait, for marketing, of a new radiologist who has joined a large, central Texas practice. I've been making marketing images for the group for over a decade and one of the things we provide often are head shots. 

I was anxious to use the K5600 HMI's that I got last week. I've used HMIs on video projects before and worked with them as a still photographer on other peoples' video projects but I'd never had the chance to use a lower output set to create portraits in my own studio. 

I put the open face Joker 200 light, with a front glass filter that gave me a nice light spread, where I usually put my main light. Up about 45 degrees and about 45 degrees off camera axis. I was pushing the photons through a 48 by 48 inch Chimera ENG panel with two layers of diffusion on it. One layer was a very thin, half stop silk and the next layer (with a quarter inch gap between the two) was a one stop silk. The light was gorgeous and I used the diffusion about four feet from my subject. While the HMI was the dominant front light there was indirect fill coming from the day light outside through my ten foot by ten foot, northwest facing bank of windows. The color temperatures matched perfectly.  I also put up a 3x3 foot chunk of white foamcore to the other side as additional fill.

Books, Depth of Field and Days Spent in the Studio.

Many years ago I was running a regional advertising agency and our biggest client was a company called, BookStop Bookstores. They were the first, serious category killer in the book business. A forerunner in the merciless slaughter of small, independent book stores. As they grew from a local, Austin retailer to a national chain with over 100 locations, our little ad agency grew along with them.

Bookstop's main value propositions were the facts that each store had large inventories (over 100,000 books in stock!!!) and lower prices (20 to 80% off, everyday). 

When we were busy running an agency I didn't have time to photograph the books that needed to be photographed for cooperative advertising and marketing in general so we subbed that out to various photographers. Eventually the chain became large enough to become a juicy (and very willing) takeover target for a bigger fish; Barnes and Noble. In the matter of a few months we said goodbye to our client and, after careful introspection (prodded by a downturn in the Austin economy) we decided to shutter the agency and move on. 

I moved into commercial photography and started my business in the deep economic trough created by the mid-1980's real estate free fall engendered by the savings and loan bust. Fortunately the design work for Bookstop ended up at a design firm run by a good friend. As the book business (and the inflow of new capital) improved the designers seemed to be churning out three or four newspaper co-op ads per week and some sort of four color catalog or flyer at least once a month. And since the account originally got steered to them by our referral I got the lion's share of the photography work. 

It was a two edged sword. On one hand my business was in the black from the very start but on the other hand I spent the better part of two years shooting hundreds, maybe thousands of books. In those days a fair amount of the book advertising, running full page or double truck in newspapers, was done in black and white. This meant that I'd shoot the books, soup the film and print a final reproduction print under a nice, tight deadline. Sometimes we'd get the books in the late afternoon and the final prints would be due the next morning....