I receive emails almost daily asking me to explain how I create some of my images. In the madness of shooting, I always forget to take photos of the set and the lighting to use for this exact reason. So I usually draw up little hand drawings and try to explain what I did. It’s never quite clear.

Well, now I have an intern who has the responsibility of taking behind the scenes shots and documenting my setups. So now, I will begin a little “series” of blog articles entitled, “Anatomy of an Image”. Hopefully, this will give my readers who are curious a little more insight into exactly how I’m making images. In cases like this job, I’ll separate different parts of the job into different articles.

ANATOMY OF AN IMAGE:
TERANI COUTURE, Spring 2009
PART ONE: THE SET

One of my eveningwear clients, Terani Couture came to me with a whole bunch of tear sheets, or swipes, out of the major fashion magazines and said, “We want this!” I said, “OK, let’s send one of my assistants out to scout for locations available.” “This is done on location?” they asked. “Yep.”

Needless to say, they’re very comfortable shooting in my studio, so we ended up building an entire set for their shoot that was basically a room. My crew and I have had a decent amount of experience building sets, I probably have more tools than the average carpenter. We have compressors, nail guns, multiple wireless screw guns, tarps, hack saws, miter saws… you name it, it’s on a shelf somewhere in the studio. I have contractor accounts at Home Depot and Lowes and have bought enough Luan and furring strips to build about 50 houses — if houses were made of Luan and furring strips (which they’re not).

The biggest challenge in building a set for a catalog shoot in the studio is that after a while all the images start to look the same, so you start to bring in furniture and move the furniture and change the lighting a bit, change the angles, etc, to keep the viewer interested.

While I don’t mind going off plan when I get some form of a “creative vision”, I think everything has to start with a plan. I’m not the best sketch artist in the world, in fact far from it, but I do my best with pen and paper to create a sketch of the proposed set. With some clients, they accept my first rendering, with others it takes three or four versions before they finally approve. And even then, things change as we’re building.

In order to create an accurate budget for the client, I then translate my sketch into a materials list. I list every little piece that I will need.

There’s two reasons for the material list:

1) It gives me an accurate representation of budget;

2) It gives me a list to bring to the lumber yard.

The second part is probably even more important than the money, there is nothing worse than needing something you forgot to pick up at 2:00 AM when the call time is 6:00 AM. Preparation is key; Purchasing extra materials is also. As my assistants and I began building the set the night before, I realized that my initial 8 foot back wall wasn’t going to cut it. We needed room to move around, we needed places to put lights, and we needed more “variety” in the set. So we added an extra 4 foot section to the back wall.

Unfortunately, because our studio is so busy, we usually forced to build sets the night before the shoot as we’re breaking down a set from the previous job, and this was no different than the rest. I started my day at the lumber yard at 7:00 AM (though I trust my crew immensely, I know they’ll always forget something if I send them). By the time everything was purchased, loaded in the truck and brought up to the studio my assistants were already asking for lunch, it was 2:00 PM. We had a bite to eat (mexican) and then started our little building adventure.

If you looked closely at the materials list, you probably noticed there’s no sheet rock, or two-by-fours; not even any screws or nails. When you’re building a set, you’re not building something that needs to be standing for months (although, our sets probably could). We use the cheapest and lightest weight materials that we can find and, most of the time, they do the job just fine. When there is something more substantial on the wall, we add more support to the back.

By 10:30 PM, we had our set just about done. The fresh paint needed some time to dry, so we had a few finishing touches for the morning, but by the time the models walked out of hair and makeup we’d be ready to go.

Here’s an image from the shoot:

That’s it for this part. Next time, I’ll discuss lighting.

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