Started the work week on Tuesday with a night shoot in Brooklyn Heights. I came into the office around noon to meet the photographer who wanted me to show him how to get to Fulton Ferry landing in Brooklyn on his bike.
We were joined by his assistant and friend and rode across the Brooklyn Bridge. I had told him earlier in the week about this art piece called the "Telectroscope" that was supposed to be an underground telescope looking straight to London.
We found it and hung out for a while using white boards and dry erase markers to communicate with the people in London.
The photographer had arranged for his brother and sister to be on the other side, and after a short wait, sure enough, his brother and sister appeared and we awkwardly stared at each other before getting bored and just called them on the phone. Really cool concept and great presentation but its essentially just Skype without an audio feed. We then rode our bikes a few blocks over to Brooklyn heights and waited for production to arrive on our shoot.
A Comp I did of the Financial District while waiting.....
It started pouring down rain as soon as we set up all the gear (outside...awesome) but we had a decent amount of pop up tents and tarps, so we hunkered down until the storm passed. We only had two hours to shoot 8 shots, and we were running the jolly green giant of generators which was actually red, ridiculously loud, and definitely isn't green in the environmental sense. Brooklyn Heights is one of the nicest (read: Most Expensive) areas in brooklyn, and since the sun doesn't go down till well after 8 this time of year, we didn't even start shooting till 9. Therefore we only had an hour to shoot as our exit deadline was 10.
Once the art director asked for fog machines I knew we had a disaster on our hands. Huge lights, smoke machines, loud generators......BK heights was not happy with us after about 20 minutes of shooting. Needless to say when 10 pm rolled around we only had 4 shots done. We squeezed another two out with the big lights and rocked a Richardson/Testino style on camera flash (Lumidine) for the remainder. Once we were stacked and packed I had the option of taking the train back to the willy B or riding aimlessly through brooklyn on my bike hoping to find a street I recognized. I chose the latter being that it was midnight and we had a 9 am call time the next morning. Picture a lanky white kid riding his mountain bike with through some not so safe areas of brooklyn, riding with no hands because he has to google his location on his iphone, at 12:30 at night on a tuesday. I laughed. Then almost got hit by a buick.
The next day we hubbed out of industria studios and shot all along the cobble-stoned streets of the west village. It was pretty uneventful until we saw Keanu Rieves. I said that I know Kung Fu. He didn't look amused. The shoot was really chill and went by quickly.
The day after, we drove up to Bear Mountain to shoot a Ad-itorial for Japanese Vogue. Beautiful location, lame clothing, long day. My printer broke (as usual) which always sucks, and we ended up shooting to card because of how rocky it was up there
Not the best shoot day I've had. It ended up being a 16 hour day with travel, and we had to shoot a cover for Time magazine the next day. Then we were flying to spain the day after that. One of those weeks I suppose. However I still managed to play a few games of Dice on Mark Seliger's rooftop, and ended up winning 45 dollars. Too bad it was gone after one round of big buck hunter and some drinks.
Stay tuned for the Spain story, and a song by my new favorite band....MGMT.
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