Recently I had the pleasure of working with Carolyn Kunkel, a young lady with a laundry list of coolness, among them roller derby and mountain board. I've been wanting to shoot with her for a few weeks now and finally got the chance. Part of the problem was that I contacted her right before the Passover holiday and it was almost three weeks later that I was able to put any thought into it. I've been reading a lot of Joe McNally's stuff (books and blog) and there was a lighting set up I wanted to try out. Namely putting green gels on my strobes and setting the camera's white balance to flourescent and shooting into a sunset. The subject should remain neutral, but the sky should go magenta and purple and all sorts of wonderful. With this in mind I called up Carolyn and suggested the Manhattan Bridge as a background, she was up for it --cool! On the day of the shoot I brought my brother Rodrigo, and my good friend Michael to help out holding the lights. Recently New York City changed it's policy for still photography permits. Gone are the days of just faxing it in. I used to be able to do it same day sometimes. Now the new policy is no permits are necessary as long as it's all hand held, but bring in even one light stand and you have to fill out a much more complicated form and show a certificate of insurance in person, at least 24 hours before the shoot. So enter the lighting equipment --all now hand held.
Carolyn brought her friend Kate Fryburg to do make up. Who was an invaluable help with her make-up artistry and great suggestions. We started off from Vinegar Hill, stopping close by to get a couple of motion shots of Carolyn on her mountain board
Carolyn was a great sport and kept making these jumps until I was happy we had a few good ones in the bag. Which wasn't long, we were losing light and had other shots to get. A few blocks later, Kate noticed a piece of graffiti that made a great background and spoke to Carolyn's personality. Concerned about the quickly sinking sun, we nevertheless stopped to take a few quick shots, coming out with one of my favorite portraits, which I put on the main site and in interest of not becoming too redundant here is the very close second. It was a tough decision, so I'm glad to include it here.
Moving on, we got to the spot I had chosen for the experimental lighting that started this all off. It's an old rotting pier, at one point not too long ago, it still had most of it's surface intact and people used to go there to sunbathe. Now all that's gone, leaving a fantastic bit of urban decay in DUMBO, which itself used to be a derilict neighborhood, but these days its undergone quite a makeover. Let's just say it sports it's own Starbucks now. We set up quickly and started shooting as the sun slowly disappeared. A work truck stopped by to see what we were doing, but left soon after. I guess we didn't pose a significant threat to the shoreline, and since all our equipment was hand held they left us alone.
Which was fine with me. We got some nice images and called it a day. Just in time too, it was getting dark, and my bags are black.
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