I was asked recently by former professors Greg Voight and Chuck Place to do a lighting demo at an upcoming Brooks Institute Open House.  As a Brooks alumni, this was a fun way for me to support my alma mater and say hello to all my old friends.  We set up two different lighting scenarios, each on a different Pocket Wizard channel, and I was able to quickly switch between looks by just selecting a different channel on the transmitter on my camera.  I asked for volunteers to pose and this young gentleman was “volunteered” by Chris Broughton, and I’d say he chose well.  Great hat!

Special thanks to Naryanan N. and John Stivers for helping set up and tear down the massive amount of eq.

I got the chance to photograph one of my mentors, Paul Meyer yesterday.  He is a professor at Brooks Institute, and having taken 4 classes with him, I can say that he was one of my biggest influences during my time at Brooks.  I learned great technique from him, photographic history, business, and most importantly, creativity.  One of the greatest lessons I learned from Paul was to “see the light.”  Light is no mystery.  Just open your eyes and look carefully.

I was honored when he looked at one of my photographs and said “I want to be photographed like that,” so we scheduled a time and met at the studio.

Thanks Paul for a great shoot and for being so generous with your knowledge, wisdom, and experience.

I had the pleasure of attending the NAMM show this year.  As an up and coming music photographer, this was a great opportunity and a huge marketplace for my work.  I met a lot of great new people and also reconnected with some old friends from my hometown of Cleveland.  I brought my camera with me and photographed the entire 4 days I was there.  Here are some of the highlights.

Happy new year everyone!  Here’s how our family is spending our new year’s day.

I spent far too much of 2011 on my butt in front of a computer.  This morning was my first attempt in a long time to change that.  I’m looking forward to more mornings like this in 2012.  Best wishes and a happy new year to all of you!  Do what you love!

Enjoy some fun images from Christmas at our house.  Best wishes for 2012!

I had the pleasure of photographing the Kenny Werner All Star Quintet this past weekend at Catalina’s in Los Angeles.  Kenny Werner is one of the greatest pianists in jazz today, and he brought with him an incredible group of musicians including Randy Brecker on trumpet and flugelhorn, David Sanchez on tenor saxophone, Scott Colley on upright bass, and Antonio Sanchez on drums.  For those who don’t know me, I’ve been a musician all my life.  I started playing drums at the tender age of three, and began my career as a jazz drummer at 14.

I’ve been doing it for over 20 years.

I started my photography career by taking photos of musicians.  In the last 10 years I’ve learned how to photograph almost anything in any situation, but my passion still lies with photographing musicians.  So I made a few portraits of Kenny and his bandmates.

To see the live shots, click the image below and visit my new music website.

For more about me, check out this short video I produced about my thoughts on portrait photography.

Way back in July of last year I wrote a post on this blog about the importance of doing what you love.  I really believe that enjoying life is paramount to maintaining a healthy, creative mindset.

I’ve been so busy lately with work and raising a 2 year old that I haven’t had time to do some of the things that keep me inspired.  Even as I read that post from a year and a half ago, I realize that some things I talked about haven’t been implemented.  This blog is a good way for me to check back at where I was, and see if I’ve done what I had hoped to do.  So whether it be shooting something for yourself, for your soul, listening to music, watching movies, or relaxing and enjoying something completely outside of your creative life, what do you do to stay inspired?

I’ve been teaching a basic photo class since the summer at the Santa Barbara PAL Teen Center.  It’s been a really rewarding experience for me to share my knowledge and engage and inspire young adults with the beauty of photography.  The Teen Center is a great place for kids to hang out after school and it provides a multitude of sports and classes to keep kids off the streets.  Here is a video I produced over the summer with my colleague Mark Nagel which was used by the Police Activities League to raise funds for the Teen Center.

SB PAL Teen Center from Matt Perko on Vimeo.

I’ve been having fun in the studio at Brooks recently, and as a follow up to my last blog entry, I decided to do another behind-the-scenes post with a  lighting diagram.  Creating and controlling shadows can add a lot of depth and interest to a photo.  In my previous post I controlled my light with distance, placement, feathering, and even using a grid to further restrict the light.  In this series of photographs I wanted to create a dramatic “shaft” of light.  To further enhance the drama, I added 1 and 1/4 CTO gels to create the color contrast I love to use.

There are a few important factors to creating a shaft of light like this.  The important factors are the distance of the light source to the flag/cutter/gobo/cookie/whatever, and the distance of the flag/cutter/gobo/cookie/whatever to the model.  See the diagram below for more.  For hard shadows and a well defined shaft of light, the gobo needs to be very close to the model, and the light source needs to be as far away as you can get it.  This creates a couple of problems.  The smaller your studio is, the closer that gobo needs to be to your model to maximize the distance from the gobo to the light source.  This can be problematic if you are doing anything other than tight head and should shots as shown below.  The other problem is created by having the light very far away.  This causes the light to spread out and cover a large area.  That is counter to what we are trying to create in the photograph, so we need some fairly large gobos to restrict the light to just where we want it.  One of the easiest ways to do this is to buy 2 4×8′ pieces of foamcore and tape them together to form a “v flat.”  In this series I used a v flat to create a wall to block most of the light of my flash.  This allowed me to keep a dramatic black background.  I used two cutters, or long rectangular flags at the edge of the v flat to let that little shaft of light come through.  After a bit of tweaking, my shaft was perfectly placed.  The image needed more depth.  Since I was using CTO gels for the key, any un-gelled flash would now be tinted blue, like the quality of moonlight.  Knowing this, I boomed a medium strip box above and behind my subject for a hair/rim light, and added a big soft fill light above the camera at its lowest power for just a touch of fill.  The final images are below.

What I had hoped to imply with the light was a dark moonlit evening, with a dramatic shaft of light coming out of the crack of a doorway.  I think the light is convincing, and my model Iram  played her part perfectly.