My favorite congressman, Charlie Rangel is in trouble and in the spotlight.  That means pictures from the marathon photoshoot I had with him last summer are popping up in the mags now.  Time magazine took the opportunity to use this picture that I shot for them (which has a very different vibe than the one they ran to accompany the article they published last year) and I know another one of my Rangel shots made a little cameo in New York Magazine.

Last summer, I had a dream photo shoot for an Australian magazine that sent me to take portraits of billionaire philanthropist Julian Robertson and his wife Josie at their spectacular home on Central Park South.  The couple was exceedingly generous with their time and the shoot was a true delight.  When I first entered their home, I remarked “Wow, this looks like something I’ve seen in Architectural Digest,” to which Mrs. Robertson casually replied, “You have.”  Their home was a wonderland of beautiful things.  The collection of fine art on the walls rivaled many museums I’d been to, yet it still felt very much like a home.  The art was actually the reason I was there for the shoot- the Robertsons had donated several pieces- including works by Picasso, Cezanne and Matisse- to the Auckland Art Gallery last year.

Mrs. Robertson struck me as a very lovely and elegant woman, and I was saddened to learn recently that she passed away in June of this year after a long fight with breast cancer.  My condolences to her friends and family.  I am certain she is dearly missed by many.

Here are a few of the obituaries I found online which chronicle a remarkable and giving life:

One

Two

Three

The following are pictures of places that are featured in present and future television or movies like Treme and The Green Lantern, as per the theme of the article.

My friend Kevin, a.k.a. Balktick: party promoter extraordinaire.

]]> http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/2010/08/02/campfire/feed/ 4 http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/2010/07/30/tomadams/ http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/2010/07/30/tomadams/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:56:34 +0000 Melissa Golden http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/?p=363

My folks got me Rosetta Stone’s Thai language learning software one Christmas.  I had fun with it, but sold it after I decided not to move to Bangkok.  That being said, this shoot was the first time I’d been asked to photograph a businessman who produces a product I have actually used.  That made it personal somehow- it upped the “neat-o” factor that I feel on a lot of my shoots.

I like shooting businesspeople.  CEOs and presidents and venture capitalists and the like are usually my biggest challenge because for them, time is literally money.  The more time they spend on the set of a photoshoot, the less time they have to spend helming the company ship on the high seas of international commerce.  I’m lucky if I get 5 minutes with people like that.  Trouble is, it’s difficult to get a meaningful photo of any stranger inside of 5 minutes.  Oh, it’s simple to take a good photo of anyone in 5 minutes, but it’s rare that the 5-minute-shoot ever transcends adequate.

Inc. Magazine asked me to do one of the simplest things a photographer could do for a shoot like this:  full body, white seamless.  That’s something that you can bang out in one minute if you have to.  Granted, it can take a while to set up, but the actual shoot time required is negligible once everything is in place.

Thing is, I’d never actually shot a full-body white seamless before.  I owned a 4-ft white seamless and a good background stand, but I’d never had to do anything more complicated than mugshots on white, like my Ron Paul shoot.  I didn’t realize how complicated it gets when you go whole-body.  I did some research and determined that I was woefully under-prepared.  I needed a much longer white seamless paper roll, but an 8-footer would never fit in my car and a 12-footer was out of the question.  My assistant for the shoot had her own 4-foot white seamless roll, so yankee ingenuity struck and I figured it would be super easy to just tape the rolls together to create an 8-footer.  Not technically seamless, but easy enough to fix in post-production.

Tom was a lot of fun to work with, generous with his time, and between the standard CEO power poses, he gave me gold.  Normally, I wouldn’t show raw pictures on here, but I already mentioned that my white seamless had a big fat seam in the middle and you’ve seen the end result above, so I’m gonna let it slide just this once.

I’m pretty sure he’s mocking my “seamless” in that last picture.

I’ve since come up with a much more legitimate solution for my large white seamless needs.

]]> http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/2010/07/30/tomadams/feed/ 0 http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/2010/07/29/morning/ http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/2010/07/29/morning/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:37:45 +0000 Melissa Golden http://melissagolden.visualsociety.com/?p=358 Anyone who really knows me knows I’m not a morning person.  If I had my way, I’d stay up until 4am and sleep until noon every day.  Trouble is, lots of things happen in DC in the morning.  I have a problematic commute that involves either getting to the metro station before 7 a.m., after which point the parking lots fill up, or driving into town, which thanks to HOV regulations and nightmare traffic conditions, can easily take an hour and 45 minutes.  However, when I need to be up, I get up and I haul my ass in to town and sometimes I’m rewarded with sights like this:

Makes it all worth it.

I often forget there are two golden hours in a day, and while I usually only ever get to see the sunset, I think sunrise can lay claim to better light.

I got to spend a little time in Salisbury, Maryland where I photographed incoming AARP President Lee Hammond for the AARP Bulletin.  The pressure was a bit higher on this shoot since he’s the president of the organization that produces the publication (and a retired school administrator to boot) but it couldn’t have been a more relaxed shoot.  I photographed him at a local board meeting and then we went back to his home where we did the portrait session.  Afterward, I went out to lunch with Lee and his wife at a nice local restaurant on the water.  It’s always a treat when you get to spend more time like that with the people you photograph.

I think the wallpaper is just divine and was pleased as could be when I spotted it.

Much like Brigadoon, the musical supergroup that is the Rock Bottom Remainders appears out of the mists only once in a blue moon.  If you’re lucky to catch them in concert, you will be treated to the likes of literary behemoths Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow and Dave Barry among others performing their hearts out for charity.  I got to spend a night behind the scenes with these guys at the 9:30 Club for the AARP Bulletin and it was unreal.

While group regular Stephen King was missing from this year’s lineup, Greg Iles and James McBride brought an air of rockstar cool to the mix.  Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Roger McGuinn of the Byrds even popped in for a few songs to show everyone how it’s done.

Check out the article here

I’ve never seen so many music stands outside a middle school band concert.  They made it difficult to get clean shots from below.

“Miracle at St. Anna” author James McBride rocked the sax and chart-topping suspense novelist Scott Turow rocked some impressive wigs.

Not the most exciting picture, but here for scale.  There were at least 12 people on that stage at any given time.

Funnyman Dave Barry.

Greg Iles played a mean lead guitar and kept me personally entertained with some good stories from tours past.

The crowd was clearly having a good time.  Not too shabby for a charity concert.

Roger McGuinn jams backstage in some moody light.  I do love the 9:30 club.

Believe it or not, this is “The Joy Luck Club” author Amy Tan.  She was channeling Debbie Harry all evening.

You may know him from the radio show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” or one of his 21 books.  Roy Blount Jr. is just awesome.  I would hire him to emcee everything ever if I had the money.

The ever wonderful, talented and fabulous Melina Mara of the Washington Post approached me about collaborating with her on some album art for Parliament Hill, an up and coming band straight outta Georgetown. It’s rare that photojournalist types get to work together like that, so I jumped at the chance.

As I recall, the concept was to somehow capture the album’s name, “Light the Dark” in pictures, so I met Jess and Kevin at the crack of dawn at Melina’s place downtown.  I showed up before sunrise to scout locations with Melina who made the pre-dawn excursion far more bearable with some tea and her sunshine of a personality.  Seriously.  If you haven’t met her, Melina is one of those people whose light is so bright, you feel all warm and happy when she talks to you.

Kevin and Jess showed up a little after dawn.  The poor rocknrollers slept in and scrambled to make it to the location before all the good morning light disappeared.  We actually ended up shooting in alleys that didn’t get any light until a bit later in the morning so it worked out.

Melina and I each shot portraits of the band, trading off and helping each other with lights or reflectors as needed.  For those of you who know how I like to work, I was all about shaping that gorgeous morning light with my reflectors and foregoing the lights for much of my shoot.  Some might call my avoidance of “big lights” a weakness or disadvantage, but to those haters I say: why not take full advantage of the biggest, best light of all?  The natural light of any given space seriously shapes how my portrait sessions progress.  I particularly love working in the morning or late afternoon (golden hours!) when the light is shifting dramatically and it highlights spots I would never have thought to frame up.  This was just such a shoot.

This was from early in the morning before the light hit the alley.  Nice and even against the best garage door I’ve ever seen.

My experiment with Melina’s lights.  Yes, I’ll use lights when I see fit.

This is the cover shot of Light the Dark.  I was so excited to get my hands on a copy, I popped it into the cd player in my car right away only to be blown away.  Outstanding vocals and instrumentation.  Stellar, chill album.  Real nice.

And the inside with pictures by Melina.  The album is on iTunes.  Check it out.

Fundamentally, it is the people I photograph who make the picture.  Sometimes, accessories and location take my shoots to the next level of cool.  To that end, I photographed the very sweet and very talented Alice Tangerini at the Museum of Natural History where she works.  Alice is a botanical illustrator who creates beautiful works of art, not for display, but for science.  She works in the finest detail and must rely upon her steady hands and keen eyesight- only her eyesight is not what it used to be.  A few years ago, she noticed her normally perfect lines were crooked.  She later learned that the hand tends to track the eye and that her right eye suffered from macular pucker, which is scar tissue that forms on the eye’s macula and can blur and distort vision.  She has since had corrective surgery, but must wear an eye patch over her right eye when she does her ink work in order to keep those lines steady.  She certainly could have gone with basic black , but likes the pirate eye patch because it makes light of an otherwise serious situation.  Read the story here.

In summation:  getting to photograph a talented pirate-eye-patch-wearing woman at work in the back rooms of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History = portrait session bliss.

Some of Alice’s work.  The detail is incredible and I’m not really doing it justice.  Suffice it to say that every line and every dot is drawn by hand.

She’s got a pretty great view- that’s the Washington Monument out her window there.

Some of Alice’s tools of the trade.  This kind of beautiful ephemera was scattered all over the office and each nib and brush had a special purpose.

Alice at work, inking.