July 2009

Shooting some “celebrities”

July 17, 2009 – 11:30 pm
Filed under As It Happened, Photos
5 Comments

This week, between days off, I worked with the High School Celebrity Fashion Styling Class at LIM College. It’s a mouth full, I know. Basically, LIM College has a summer program for high school students. One of the classes offered is Celebrity Styling in which students learn the ups and downs and sidewayses of dressing and styling celebrities for everywhere from magazine covers to the red carpet. The professor, the always fabulous (and wonderfully crazy) Adrienne Weinfeld-berg, asked if I would shoot the class’s final shoot. I happily agreed.

I’ve been working with LIM students pretty consistently for the past two years, but I haven’t done a huge Mega Super Photoshoot Day with them since November 2007. Like the last time, I first came into one of the classes to lecture the students on working with a photographer. Basically, I get to go up in front of a group of teenagers and talk about myself for an hour. And who doesn’t love to do that?

The day after that was The Photoshoot Day and, let me tell you, it was an adventure. The entire week beforehand, I was going out of my mind trying desperately to find models and a makeup artist. In the end, I finally pulled it together and got two professional models and three friends to volunteer their services. The hair and makeup artist, the lovely Tracy Paris, was beyond talented with what she did. I worked with her before on my Sweet Dreams photoshoot, but I had never really had a chance to see her get down and dirty with the makeup. She pretty much knocked everybody’s socks off, especially Adrienne, who I’m pretty sure was about to have a stroke caused by sheer glee.

The call-time for the shoot was 8:30am sharp. This meant that Elaina (my assistant for the day), Carianne (my model for the day), and I (the photographer) had to meet at Pratt at 7:15 to pick up the lighting equipment before heading to midtown for the shoot. What an ordeal that was, lugging a laptop, a camera, a tripod, a boombox, a soft box, light stands, and then an entire strobe kit onto a subway filled with morning commuters. I’m so happy to have friends that are willing to help me out like that.

The actual shoot was total chaos, but in a pretty enjoyable way. Adrienne was unable to obtain a studio for the shoot, so we had to make due with an empty classroom. We also had no seamless backdrop, so the styling groups each brought materials to drape behind the models. The students, acting as stylists for the first time, were in a tizzy as they frantically tried to assemble sets and get their models dressed. All-in-all, the entire shoot took about five hours. A pretty decent amount of time considering that it actually consisted of five shoots and there still had to be time alloted for set-up and hair and makeup. Check out the photos below!

Read More »

Gaahhh! Famous people!

July 13, 2009 – 9:01 pm
Filed under As It Happened
0 Comments

So, I was walking to Pratt today to help my friend Carianne out with her website and I noticed an abundance of movie trailers parked outside of the campus. Movie trailers are a fairly common site in my neighborhood, but this was an unusually large amount. The cavalcade of trailers and tents extended not just beyond the campus but several blocks away, filling much of the neighborhood. On campus, the grounds were filled with a number of cranes and dollies and other cinematographic equipment. Along with all of this, the signs on the campus had all been changed to read “Stanford University” and there were potted palm trees everywhere to give the Brooklyn campus a bit more of a more California-y feel.

After helping Carianne out for a bit, we both walked back out onto the campus and went to sit down on the grass. On the way, I asked a tech guy what exactly was going on and he said that they were filming a movie called “Going The Distance.” I immediately went onto IMDB on my phone and found out that the movie starred not only Drew Barrymore but Justin Long and Christina Applegate! Grabbing any opportunity to gawk at celebrities, I went back home, got a blanket and my camera and Carianne and I set up camp on the Pratt campus. After a while, classes got out and summer students began to fill up the lawn.

The first person that people noticed was Justin Long, as he stuck his head out of a window and waved at the crowd down below. Soon after, both he and Drew walked out of the building and onto the campus to join the rest of the crew. The lens on my camera doesn’t extend very far, but luckily, Carianne had a telephoto lens that she let me borrow. I felt a bit like a paparazzo as I frantically tried to capture every moment.

Read More »

So. My Hair.

July 8, 2009 – 6:19 pm
Filed under Thoughts
3 Comments

I was reading a profile of Nora Ephron in The New Yorker the other day and I stumbled across a quote that pretty much sums up the feelings I have about my hair. Ephron is quoted as having said, “The amount of maintenence involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.” I feel like this woman knows me.

My hair is seriously the bane of my existence. In terms of genetics, I was not blessed with the lovely wavy locks that so many people take for granted. My hair is completely, horribly, 100% straight. People have constantly reminded me of how lucky I am to be born with naturally straight hair, noting how much time it takes for them to flat-iron their hair. Why, I wonder, would anybody want to do such a thing?

My hair isn’t just straight. It’s dry and flat and limp and dull on top of being straight. Imagine a porcupine with straw on its back instead of bristles. When my hair has no product in it, each strand stands entirely on its own, pointing directly outward, like on somebody who has just been struck by lightning. This makes my hair incredibly high maintenance not only because I have to spend about an hour grooming it, but also because of the number of products I have to apply to it (three).

The sad and, unfortunately, permanent state of my hair also makes it nearly impossible to cut properly. Whenever I go to a salon, the stylist thinks they know what they’re getting into, but they really have no idea what kind of monstrous creature lives on the top of my head. After I leave a hair salon, nine times out of ten I look as if somebody let Helen Keller go at it on my head with a pair of rusty scissors. Because my hair is about as lifeless as a rotting corpse, all of the fancy layers that the stylist put in it to thin it out and boost its texture end up looking like terraces on a seriously demented mountain. Most layers, when implemented correctly, should blend in with the rest of the hairs and subtly add life and body to a hairstyle. With me, because my godforsaken hair has a life of its own, my layers like to announce themselves to the world and set up their own independent governments.

Read More »

The downsides of looking incredibly underage

July 1, 2009 – 11:38 pm
Filed under As It Happened
2 Comments

So, Carianne and I went shopping in Manhattan on Monday. Carianne’s boyfriend’s eleven year-old daughter, Pilar also came along. After making several stops in Tribeca and then Soho, we walked into a Halloween costume shop on Broadway.

After browsing around the first floor for a few minutes and discovering what I want to be for Halloween this year (Santa Claus), we found our way into the basement. The lower level consisted of more costumes and some horror-genre props like disembodied hands, feet, and eyeballs. Carianne sat on a bench near the stairs and Pilar and I explored the lower level further.

As I was examining a plastic decapitated head, a woman walked up to us. She had black frizzy hair, glasses, and kind of resembled the woman who takes care of the cats on 30 Rock. She had the air of a self-important hall monitor as she approached us and asked where our parents were.

Pilar and I exchanged raised eyebrows.

“There are some things down here that aren’t really kid-friendly,” the woman continued. “Are your parents here with you?”

A bit taken aback, I said, “Uhhm…. no?”

“Well,” the woman said. “You need to have an adult accompanying you to be down here.”

“I kind of am the adult,” I said, giving Pilar another sideways glance as if to say, This woman has got to be kidding.

The woman smirked at me in a way that said Aw, shucks, aren’t you guys cute? and said, “Okay, well, I’ll let that slide for now. So long as you guys act like adults and not little kids.”

And, in other news, I turn twenty one on Friday.

La Sirena

July 1, 2009 – 8:06 am
Filed under As It Happened, Photos
2 Comments

Yesterday morning, Katrina and I woke up at 5am and drove to Coney Island for a Saraghina-inspired photoshoot. Leaving the car, we began to attract stares from everybody we walked by. I was carrying about five different bags and had a camera around my neck. Katrina was pulling a huge suitcase, she was dressed in booty shorts and a midriff-exposing shirt, her hair was tousled every which way, and she had caked on enough makeup to clog every pore in New York. “I look like a prostitute,” she laughed as we walked past elderly morning joggers. “Seriously, if I saw me walking down the street, I would be like, ‘that’s a hooker!’”

We arrived at the beach, unpacked our bags, and started shooting. All-in-all, we had four different looks, each suited pretty well to the whole rundown carny aesthetic of Coney Island. For the last look, we ventured out onto the street and were lucky enough to find an old man who let us use his AWESOME car as a prop in our shoot. On the street, Katrina garnered even more attention now that it was about ten in the morning and shops were beginning to open.

Read More »