Check out LEO Weekly’s Valentine Issue on stands and their site now.
I shot the cover and feature images at Nachbar during a particularly crazy night. Things that added to the chaos: two bands (Adventure and Danger Bird), a photo booth, a caricaturist, the Party Crasher, a blue million future alcoholics, and a freaking mustache party… Oh and the constant threat of rain. There was no room in the bar to set up. It is a smallish bar that is packed on weekends.
The assignment was to get portraits of people making their oh face… or their public version of it. Very silly. As you can imagine, it was no small feat to convince someone to do something that potentially embarrassing for a pub that would be on their coffee table the following Wednesday.
I started out a little to ambitious – two off camera strobes, a homemade beauty dish, and a small roll of background paper. After spending 20 minutes trying to tape the paper to a picket fence with the worst tape ever made (Walgreens clear packing tape), out doors, in the wind, I made the executive decision to skip the background and cut the images out in post. By this time the first band had started and the crowd started to swell to a point that my gear was in danger. So I down shifted again to a single strobe on a bracket with a Micro Apollo soft box. This also made me more mobile. I cranked the shutter up to kill the ambient light, and shot pretty close-in to minimize spill of the strobe on any background objects.
Lessons learned:
wind+paper+crappy tape do not mix
alcohol and tripods in the same space can spell disaster
trust and a good bedside manor are your most valuable resource