#60 Harper's Bazaar, May '95
plus knicks championship, yapping, and spec work
Good morning from Seattle, writing this to you from my couch. Please ignore the multiple Clint Eastwoods behind me, we’re shuffling some artwork around.
The World Cup is in full swing, I’m keeping an eye on tickets for the USA/Australia match here in Seattle. Would be fun to get a film camera in there and take a couple rolls of what it’s like.
Real quick: This video was the best thing I saw this week. Harper’s Bazaar, May 1995, shot by Raymond Meier and it’s got my wheels turning about the work I shoot and how I plan projects.
This is a level of storytelling you don’t see a lot. Production costs here probably weren’t astronomical. Doesn’t matter. It’s technically sound, beautifully shot, creatively directed, and I want to do more work like that.
Here’s a few quick ideas how you could too:
What movies do you like? What are the beats or the plot of the movie? How could you tell a story like that in still images, almost like a storyboard for the movie?
Think smaller: someone makes a Sunday morning coffee run, finds a hundred bucks on the street, runs into a friend, they pop into a thrift shop together and buy t-shirts. Silly little story, but it would be fun to shoot, and who knows what it’d lead to?
Shoot the photo you came to get, as well as the before and after: Maybe it’s your friend hiking up the mountain before they get to the lookout and the cold beer after they get down the mountain. You get a few beats like that throughout the shoot, and now it’s not just outdoor photos but a story of an adventure.
Get a variety of depths and proximities: Very evident in this editorial - they didn’t shoot every image all one way. They’re usually pretty close to the jewelry, but there’s wide establishing shots, closeup detail shots, position from down low and up high, all good examples.
Look to freeze moments: Properly photographing motion of the hardest things to do and still make it look good. That newspaper shot is one of the standout images, and it’s a good reminder. The more we can photograph things in mid-flight, people moving from point A to point B convincingly, etc, the more dimension it adds to a project.
You can tell, my wheels are turning. I want to shoot more stuff like this. The internet is crazy. Some random jewelry editorial from 30+ years ago is now a source of motivation. Hope you liked it as much as I did.
Things I made this week
How I’d shoot a fashion campaign during a Knicks championship celebration
Yapping about photographers dapping each other up more
Didn’t make this, but contributed: A breakdown of how to work with friends on spec projects to chase brand work
That’ll be all for today, y’all have a good one
Garrett
