Doc and Quitte

Dr. Pfeil, a general practitioner, has been a medical institution in my German hometown for as long as I can think. I never really knew him though since I went with my troubles to Dr. Ertz, the other local medical institution. Like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones or Michael Jackson and Prince, it was one or the other. My mom took me to Dr. Ertz when I was a little boy and that was that.

In one of my early works I photographed Dr. Erzt and the mother of all desks.

A few years ago though I started to get to know Dr. Pfeil, through a common friend. He is a passionate hunter and has a great dog (always a good sign in my book) named Quitte. The Doctor and his family including the dog modeled for me on a few occasions and Quitte (which is the German word for Quince) actually ended up on the cans and boxes of a line of German dog food with this idyllic shot.

In any case I wanted to shoot a somewhat formal portrait of Doc and Quitte and after picking his best looking rifle we walked to the edge of a nearby field. We positioned 2 heads on a Profoto 7b and 2 heads on a Hensel Porty around the two, but made sure we didn’t overpower the lovely evening light. We shot with a Rollei 6003 with an 80 mm lens on Kodak Portra NC 160.

Both were a pleasure to work with and I really enjoyed our time together, but then again I might feel different about them if I was a forrest dwelling quadruped.

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Mr. Smokey

One of my most favorite parts of being a photographer is that I’m allowed to use a smoke machine pretty much whenever I want to. During my cross-country trip a few years ago I even ended up buying (a used) one, since that was cheaper than renting. I’m not sure how many people drive thousands of miles with a smoke machine in their car, but in any case, I’m one of them. So, Mr. Smokey and I went to San Francisco to visit my friends Jerry and Laurel and do a little shooting for stock. We had shot on a boat earlier that day and still had time to squeeze in a few more set-ups at another location. We went back to Jerry and Laurel’s beautiful house and started setting up in the kitchen.

We lit the place with a Porty and a head in the hallway, a 7b and a head behind the camera and a 7b hidden behind the stove with one head pointing at the model from below and the other head stuck in the oven. Also in the oven was my travel companion, kite-high on fog juice, chugging away.

I love disaster pictures. I really enjoy taking photographs of things gone wrong and trouble around the corner. At the same point I want to make money and stock pictures should be commercially viable of course. So here I talked myself into believing that this could be a great ad for a food delivery service or a restaurant business. I mean what better way to send a person to Taco Bell than to show the futility of home cooking. Alas, I can’t claim that I have produced a bestseller that foggy night in San Francisco. I had to learn that unfortunately disaster and commerce don’t always go hand in hand (at least not in stock photography). And yet, deep down inside I feel that smoking up a joint is it’s own reward and the shoot was completely worth it.

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Seeing Red

When Prevention magazine’s Helen Cannavale called me up with an assignment to illustrate a story about the effects of sleep deprivation on the workforce, I immediately knew we were going to have a bit of fun on the shoot.

Based on the journalist’s findings, Helen and I bounced ideas around about what it means to be half asleep at work.  We figured the model should be wearing a night gown and slippers to make it obvious that she should still be in bed.  Then we came up with three work situations that can be caused by being overly tired.  The first being a good nap on your desk, the second being a portrait of a cold, which tired people are more prone to, and the third showing clumsiness and irritability.  Yeah, good times.

We scouted the workspaces at Prevention’s midtown office and found a corner with a few (mostly) empty rooms that worked out very nicely.  We could set up there and be out off everybody’s way for the duration of the shoot.  Then Helen worked her magic.  First she booked the beautiful red haired Jana Schoep (Ford Models), who totally fit the color palette, did some nice acting and was a great sport on top of it.  Then she got Jane Choi to do hair & make-up.  Jane is a true artist and has worked with some great photographers and film makers.  She did makeup on Bill Clinton and Christopher Walken for Martin Schoeller, for instance.  Great Stuff.  She can do nice and subtle and she can do nice and over the top.  Here she  turned our healthy, happy, well-rested model into a cold-suffering insomniac on the verge.  After Jane was done with the makeup I kept wanting to apologize to our model for still needing her around for a few hours.

Maria-Stefania (Halley Resources)  was the stylist and she put together a good outfit that worked well within that red, purple and blue color combo of a cold sufferer’s face.

We shot with a Mamiya RZ and a tethered Phase One back.  We used Profoto Acutes to light the backgrounds and as fill lights and a ringflash as the main light because I wanted to get that “deer-in-the-headlights”-feel. The ringflash produced also some red eyes in the model, an effect that we didn’t expect (this was only my second shoot with it) but that we happily accepted.  No, wait, wait:  That we didn’t lose any sleep over.  HA!

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Mud in the Face

Returned and rested from my extensive (not really) European vacation, I have to ease my way back into the blogging lifestyle, so, here’s a short and easy post as a warm up for next weeks usual wordiness.

These pics were taken as a quick and easy shoot for Getty a few years back. The brothers live near my German hometown and are the neighbors of a friend of mine.  When shooting stock it is important to keep the costs of production down (now more than ever) and besides, it’s always nice to work with people I know.  So we asked the kids if they wanted to model in exchange for prints/files and we asked the mom if she was ok with it, and would sign a model release.  Once that was squared away we went through the kids’ closets to pick the wardrobe.  It wasn’t exactly easy to find outfits without tons of logos, but we got it done in the end.

If I were to ask a New York mother if it’s ok to take her two boys into the woods for a photo shoot, I would be a little afraid of the answer, but these boy’s mom just said I should try to keep ’em busy ’til dinner time.  I love rural Germany.

We shot with a Mamiya RZ67 with a tethered Phase One P25 .  One set of Profoto 7b’s and and set of Hensel Portys (2 heads each).

We started of with the ferile close up portraits….

staged a brotherly fight, which was a big hit (pun alert) with the boys…

and ended up showcasing their soccer skills.

Then dinner was ready and we all had to go home.

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The Craigslist Olympian

There is a little beach in Brooklyn, between the bridges in Dumbo, that is one of my favorite spots in New York. Whenever I’m there I have this phantasy of going for a quick swim to Manhattan. So, when I was planning an urban sports shoot with my friend and Getty AD Sarah Foster, the image that popped first into my head was of course a swimmer preparing to cross the East River.

We mapped out a few more scenarios at that location and also scouted the beaches at the Far Rockaways in Brooklyn, since they were nice and deserted during a weekday. I didn’t want to pack the day too tightly since this was one of my earliest shoots with my (then) new digital back and we figured we’ll keep it easy all around by just shooting one model.

When it came time to cast I turned to trusty old Craigslist. I’m always amazed about the great talent you can find on this internet standby for apartment shares, used electronics, and sensual spankings. So, I sent the call out and got (amongst the usual fair share of weirdazoids) an email with the picture of a woman with an amazing body and in a pose that clearly shows that she knows how to run much better than the rest of us. I asked for a few more images and they were consistent with the first one. I gave her a call to see if she was available for the shoot and asked her if she was a runner.  The answer was yes.  Then I asked if she was a good runner.  The answer was yes.  Then I asked if she was a competitive runner.  Yes again.  And that kept going until I asked if she ever competed in the Olympics.  And again the answer was yes.  Then I fell off my chair.

The runner’s name was Aliann Pompei and she was an Olympic 400 m runner and a gold medal winner of the Commonwealth Games!!

We did the first shoots at the Dumbo beach and tried to cover certain variations of running, triathelon and swimming.  We worked with two assistants and Alliann provided the running wardrobe, while I brought the swim outfits.

One of the weird things about shooting sports for stock is the need to remove any logos, which in case of Adidas gear means that you have to turn them into the brand with the 2 stripes.  That always brings back childhood memories of anguished shoe store arguments with my mom who insisted that the cheaper sneakers with 2 stripes are as good as the ones with 3, and that no one would ever know the difference.  Yeah, right.

Alliann worked up a sweat in seconds thanks to a spray bottle.

We had 4 heads with regular reflectors on 2 Profoto 7bs that we positioned around the model, or as close to it without putting them in the river and the camera was a Mamiya RZ 67 with a Phase One P25 back.

One of my favs was the jump-the-city set-up.

After the Dumbo beach we drove to the Rockaways.  First was a close-up of Aliann’s legs on the boardwalk, which turned out to be much harder than anticipated.  It took us an uncomfortably long time to get the timing, focus, and lighting all in a row, but in the end we came up with an image that’s been selling surprisingly well, and I’m glad we stuck it out.

On the beach we shot with only 2 heads since the surf made it too dangerous to put the 7bs on the ground.  Each assistant carried a head and a pack and I shot on card instead of tethered.

At the end Aliann gave us a “game face” that I’ve been trying to emulate in every beer league soccer game since.

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New Work: One is all you need…

There’s a new gallery on my website with some of the fixie (fixed gear bicycle) riders I photographed during the summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn. To my enduring surprise I actually shot still lives as part of the project, and liked it. I guess stranger things have happened, but it can’t be many.

The title “One is all you need…”refers to the fact that fixies have only one gear, just to clarify it for people living under a rock or outside of Williamsburg.

Anyways, I’ll do a post about the shoots soon and I’ll keep working on this project, so there will be more images coming.

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Claudia Hehr’s NAKED (Don’t Get Your Hopes Up)

Claudia Hehr is a young, talented New York-based photographer transitioning from assisting to shooting full time. Obviously never an easy step, it is probably even harder in these tough times of ours. A great thing to do for a young photographer (or an old one, for that matter) is to work on a good project. Hone your craft, build a showpiece and be a good human being, and that’s exactly what Claudia Hehr did with NAKED, her beautiful, unflinching reportage about a woman’s struggle with breast cancer.

Dirk Anschütz: Claudia, how did you get started in photography?

Claudia Hehr: After I finished High School I came to the US for one year as an au-pair. As part of the au-pair program, I took some photography classes at a local college and that’s when I fell in love with taking pictures. After going back to Germany, I decided to become a photographer against the advice of friends and family (laughs). I apprenticed with the Fashion photographer Burkhard Hellwig in Stuttgart for 3 years and then moved to New York, where I started assisting a variety of photographers.

DA: Tell me about NAKED.

CH: When Meredith Gray was diagnosed for the second time with breast cancer, this time with a more aggressive form of the disease than the first time, she decided to have her struggles documented in a film and photo project.
Meredith wanted to use her situation to help other women that had breast cancer or would get that diagnosis in the future. She wanted to show the process of treating cancer, since women who get diagnosed don’t really know what’s in store for them, and she wanted to send out a positive message that there is a community and that you’re not alone with that disease. She also wanted to show that the beauty of a woman is not defined by her breasts, that a woman doesn’t have to define her femininity over her breasts. The mastectomy and the resulting change of self-image can cause tremendous difficulties and mental anguish for women.

I think having this project also helped Meredith during therapy.  It occupied her and the production of it gave her something to focus on beside her illness.

Meredith wanted to give a message of hope, while showing what happens during the therapy and that was an approach I could really identify with.

DA: How did you meet Meredith?

CH: Meredith is a fashion stylist and when she got sick, she sent out an email to the photographers that she knew, among them Jack Deutsch, whom I assisted at the time. Jack thought that I would be perfect for that project and forwarded me the email. I sent Meredith some work and a link to my website and when we met we immediately clicked. We decided to do the project together after maybe 10 minutes.

DA:  How did you approach the different shoots?

CH:  The idea was that I would be there for every surgery and major medical treatment as well as for some key moments like buying a wig or her returns from the hospital.  We also did several portrait sessions during that time.  We had to negotiate with the hospitals and get model releases from the staff.  We originally had permission to photograph the mastectomy but unfortunately the hospital people changed their mind.  They weren’t comfortable with a photographer in the OR.  Other than that the doctors and medical staff were extremely helpful and really embraced the project.

All in all we did between 10 and 15 shoots.  Sometimes we would shoot over an entire weekend.  I would take the train up to Meredith’s home in Connecticut and spend the evening before a surgery with her, than accompany her to the hospital and go back to her house when she returned home.

We spent so much time together that we quickly developed a comradery and friendship.

DA:  What equipment did you use?

CH:  I shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 5D.  The lenses were a 24-70 mm, 2.8, a 70-200 mm, 2.8, and a 50 mm, 1.8.  I used mostly daylight but I also shot with a bounced Canon Speedlight and occasionally used Dynalite strobes for the portraits.

DA:  Did you work with an assistant?

CH:  No.

DA:  Why did you choose Black & White?

CH:  Very early on, when Meredith and I talked about our vision for this project, we decided to present it in Black & White.  We wanted to really concentrate visually on the essential parts of the story and we thought that color might be distracting.

DA:  There was also a film documentary being made at the same time.  How closely did you work with the film team?

CH:  For the big shoots like the surgeries or when it came to get permits we worked as one team and I also made my photographs available for film stills.

A lot of times we kind of worked parallel to each other but a lot of times both Lisa Simmons (the director) and I worked alone with Meredith, too.

DA:  What was the biggest surprise to you during the project?

CH:  It was how strong Meredith was in dealing with the situation.  Because of that strength, I never felt sorry for her.

We also laughed a lot and had a lot of fun, I didn’t really expect that.

DA:  What did you do with this project so far?

CH:  The biggest thing is probably that Meredith and I set up a Facebook  Fanpage that developed into a community.  We have now over 3100 fans.  Our mission was to educate about breast cancer and to give courage to people who have the disease, and the fan page has been quite successful with that.

Some women shared their cancer stories on the page, some wrote to support Meredith or some to support each other.  Overall we’re very happy with how that page developed.

One problem though with Facebook was that they banned some of my images because they showed nudity.  And strangely nudity in the US seems to be defined by a woman’s nipples.  So, the topless images before the mastectomy had to go, the topless images after the mastectomy  and even the ones after she got her implants but hadn’t her nipples reconstructed yet, could stay on Facebook.

DA:  How is Meredith now?

CH:  The reconstructive surgeries are done, Meredith is cancer free and she’s doing well.

DA:  Thanks a lot for the interview.

All images are in chronological order.

To see more of NAKED go to Claudia Hehr’s website and look for the “NAKED” tab.

You can also check out the Facebook page or go to the NAKED website.

All images in this post © Claudia Hehr.

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On Bikes #2-Shit Happens

Once a year, I usually go back to Germany to visit Mama, bond with old friends, and make sure that nothing crazy happened while I was gone. I also try to work on some personal or stock projects when I’m there, since I like working outside of New York in general, for the obvious reasons like cheaper, easier, nicer, and with parking. So, when a friend told me about a kid near my hometown, who was supposed to be a crack BMX’er, I thought this could make for a nice little Getty shoot.

The rider’s name was Johannes Burg (which would’ve been funny in South Africa) and he was just a hint over 18. We talked about the shoot and he was totally into it, so we decided to meet at his local BMX track, a dirt loop with plenty of built-in jumps that was pretty much abandoned when we got there. Ideal circumstances. We started off with an easy shot to warm up.

Johannes had to go full speed into a bank, pop the front wheel a bit and then avoid the lights and the camera.  We had this shot after a few tries and moved on to the next and more difficult scenario.

For the next shot he had to fly off a jump and I had to catch him in mid air.  We picked the jump with the nice tree details in the background and set up lights from the 4 corners.  We had one Profoto 7B with 2 heads and regular reflectors on one side and and a borrowed Hensel Porty with 2 heads and regular reflectors on the other side.  We did a few trial runs to see where I could set up the camera and to get the timing down since I couldn’t see him (and he couldn’t see me) until he was in the air.  We nailed it pretty much straight away.  This was the second frame we shot:

And we should have moved on, but we didn’t.  Why, you ask?  Because we were stupid, that’s why.

Johannes and I looked at the good frame and we felt that if we can get that on the second jump, we can get something even better if we keep trying.  During the next few jumps I kept inching in with the camera for something a bit more straight on and Johannes kept trying to get more height out of the jump.  Finally between my moving the camera closer to the landing spot and Johannes changing the line of his approach we created this situation:

Johannes came over the hill and he was pointing fairly straight at me.  I let out a mighty gulp, clicked the shutter way too early and tried to hustle out of the way with a tethered Mamiya RZ and a tripod.  Johannes tried to change his trajectory in mid flight, which is never a good idea, though I’m still grateful he did.  He was way too high anyway and came down hard in the flat part after the jump right next to me.  He fell and slammed into the next bump, breaking his hand and his bike in the process.

There was a pretty depressed drive to the hospital, that didn’t get any better when he realized that he would miss two major championships he was training for.  Johannes got his x-rays and his cast without any trouble thanks to the German healthcare system and the most positive take on the situation was, that it could have been worse.

I had a miserable, sleepless night after this disaster and felt out of sorts for a few more days.  Mostly because looking back I couldn’t believe we kept repeating a dangerous stunt for no good reason and getting sloppier and sloppier as the shoot went on.  I felt like an amateur and a moron.

I saw Johannes again a few days later and he was back in good spirits  ( I guess, if you’re a serious BMX’er, you can’t dwell on spills and injuries ) and that in turn made me feel better.  He was not pressing charges against me (yeah) and I reimbursed him for his smashed up bike parts. The lessons of that shoot are still with me of course: Don’t push your or other people’s luck, stop when you have the shot, be in control, don’t egg each other on, work precisely and carry insurance.

The most interesting part of that last shot, is an extreme crop, because this is the face of someone, who knows he’s in trouble.

There is also a curious little aside to the story:  I promised Johannes to get him some bike parts from the famous S&M Bikes in California.  All the parts he wanted had names like Beringer Fork, Beringer Stem, Beringer Bar, etc. , I didn’t think anything of it until I met Matt Beringer himself last year on another BMX shoot.  And there you have it, it is a small world.

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New Work

There is a new portfolio on my website that came out of a pro bono shoot I did earlier this summer for Upstream Arts in Minneapolis.
A blog post about the shoot will follow sometime in the (possibly near) future.

And while we’re at it, here’s a little reminder that Stephen Mallon’s show opens tonight at the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg.

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On Bikes #1

Riding a bike was part of my growing up, but not exactly my favorite part. The only times I was very, if briefly, excited about biking was when I was given a banana seat bike, and again after I got a snazzy 10 speed racer. For the most part though I only biked when I was too late to walk someplace. My biking career ended abruptly and not surprisingly on the day I got my driver’s license.

To my amazement though, biking has made a strong comeback in my personal life as well as becoming an important part of my photography. I thought it might make for a nice intermittent series of blog posts to write about the bike shoots I have done.

It all started with me still being a committed pedestrian, when my good friend Silvia (a journalist) and I teamed up as a writer-photographer combo. We were mulling over possible projects to propose to German publications, when we came across ” The Ride of my Life” the autobiography of Mat Hoffmann, the daredevil BMX champion and later Jackass semi-regular. The book was highly entertaining as it described the growing-up and daily brushes with death of a child/man with no fear. Anybody reading the book would seriously question his/ her desire to become a parent, since one would suffer at least 47 heart attacks if fate would bless one with a little Mat Hoffman. To read about it though, was great.

©Unknown Photographer

Silvia and I wrote up a proposal to portray Hofman and send it to a high-brow weekly newspaper in Germany, that has a section somewhat comparable to the NY Times Magazine. They liked the idea and hired us, but then our arrangement kind of backfired on me.

On a previous job I did for the paper the expenses ran (not terribly) high. Not completely because of my fault either, but my invoice was definitely higher than usual. Then the editor for the paper called me up to suggest that I pay for part of the unexpected expenses by lowering my fee. After a bit of arguing back and forth I agreed to do it, if and only if he payed the same amount as I towards the bill. I thought it would be only fair if we both help the paper financially since we were both involved in the production. For some weird reason though, spending his own money was less attractive to the editor than spending my own money, and he agreed to pay my invoice in full. Of course little victories like that often come back to bite me in the ass.

And now was ass-biting time. When Silvia and I got the assignments to produce the Hofman story, the editor presented me with a budget that was so tiny that I had to work for free instead of very cheap, which was normal. I would have never done that, but here he clearly had me by my huevos. If I just turned down my assignment, they would have sent (and paid) another photographer to shoot my story. If we had turned it down as a team, I would have cost Silvia her job as well, and they might have sent another team to do our story. Silvia graciously offered to share her fee with me, which I didn’t take because of course it was more the principle then the dough. In the end we did the story and I was glad we did, but I never worked for that paper again. To paraphrase Paul Simon: There must be 50 ways ways to lose a client.

The shoot was taking place at the Universal Studios Theme Park in Orlando, FL. We flew down and up in one day, and sans assistant of course. To transport my equipment ( 1 Pro Acute 1200 with 2 heads) in the park, Universal gave me a hard plastic double toddler stroller. It’s always important to travel in style when on a job.

Mat Hoffman and a bunch of fellow BMX’ers were doing a regular show there that summer in a bike park in an amphitheatre. I looked for a quiet location that didn’t scream theme park and provided us with some privacy and a clean graphic background. I found it behind the theatre. After an hour of corporate interference we were finally allowed to shoot there.
In the first portrait I tried to come up with a classical pose in which he can be clearly seen and can make eye contact with the camera, yet in which he also shows his athleticism. We talked about this, and Mat came up with different suggestions. Finally he busted out the one seen on top. I love how he looks like he’s just loitering on his bike with a half-bored sarcastic ta-daa pose. I used a little slower shutter speed to get a little bit of movement in. This way you realize that he’s not just leaning against the wall, but rolling down the lane.

For the second picture I asked him to take off his shirt. I’ve been around athletes a lot and have seen some banged up people, but no one ever came close to Mat Hoffman. We talked about his knee, which was his injury-du-jour and he showed me how he could move his kneecap around in ways that made you question every assumption you ever had. His torso doesn’t look so terrible until you start zooming in on all the scars and bruises hidden in plain sight.

His amazing pain tolerance and complete lack of fear still astounds me. A while after the shoot Mat was in a vicious car accident in which he nearly lost his right arm. For years after that he couldn’t ride a bike, but thanks to a special brace and some major physical rehabilitation he now is back on the bike again.

There is a recent ESPN movie out about Mat, that was produced by Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville. Looks like it could be a lot of fun.

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