Musicians Hilary Tips and Steve Obermiller

Photo sessions such as this one stretch me a bit to integrate all that I know about:

posing people and connecting them with each other and the camera, balancing light and shadows, incorporating color and texture, compensating for both film and digital photography, as well as print and web media.

I’ve been at this photography thing for a minute, and the technical is beginning to become second nature, and because my brain doesn’t have to work so hard, it’s fun to create in this way. It’s almost intuitive– there’s a flow to it. 

I’ve been a fan of Hilary Tipps’ and Steve Obermiller’s music for several years, and I was honored when they asked me to create photos for their upcoming music release. We created these images in my studio with Cinestill 800t as well as a Sony A7RIV and several Profoto strobes and constant lights with color gels. And, then I shot through toule and prisms, and created some double exposures. I couldn’t give all my secrets away if I tried because there’s really no recreating this.

So much of my work revolves around consistency– matching headshots from one photo session to another and ensuring everything is lit exactly the same way and cropped cohesively. Never will you find portraits like this again. Art can be imitated but not replicated.