Tom Beck on Gear Patrol

I’ve been given an opportunity to review and photograph gear for one of my favorite websites, Gear Patrol.  This is a huge honor for me, and I’m very excited to be working with great bunch of folks.  Check out the review I did of one my favorite pieces of photo gear, the Domke F-2 camera bag

Technical Study:  Frascogna Music

Marty Frascogna of Frascogna Music approached me to do the main photography for his website, Frascogna Music.  Frascogna Music specializes in the business and legal support for musicians and the music industry.  He was looking for something unique, and had seen some of my other work, and decided that I had what he was looking for in a photographer.

In our creative meeting, Marty told me what his website’s layout would be like, and some of the ideas for the photography for each section.  He also showed me a couple of ideas to illustrate where he was visually coming from.  We decided to shoot on location, and do some “traveling studio” shots as well.  Also, I wanted the look to be much more editorial and staged, rather than posed.  To keep the photos looking timeless, I decided to shoot with an eye and lighting towards black and white, even though we were shooting digitally.

Our location was a local recording studio, The Terminal, and we spent several hours shooting different scenarios in the studio, as well as different elements of the studio to correspond with certain parts of the site.  For example, I photographed a studio microphone to illustrate the “Contact” portion of the site.

For the portrait, I kept the lighting very simple, using a softbox and a separation light on his left side to pull him out of the black background, and a bounce to slightly fill in the shadows on the right side of his face. 

I used ambient lighting filled and enhanced by my lighting to achieve a more realistic and editorial look to the scenario photos.

Marty and I had discussed a portrait of him wearing studio headphones as a possible photo for his site or blog (http://www.musicglobalization.com).  I was using the same setup as I had for his portrait when I decided to really editorialized the photo by shooting one half of Marty’s face.  Liking what I saw, I pulled some out the separation light to make the photo a little more mysterious.

This was a fun, interesting project in which the main challenge was in not over lighting the subject.  If I had, the B&W work would have completely lost the feeling of classic editorial photography.  Be sure to visit Frascogna Music to see the final crops and layout.