THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE PAPER is out the door now, so here is some of what we did. The above shot was for a science teacher with a new sci-fi focused English class. I used three lights, one softbox high to the right, another just below the camera (practically on-axis) for fill, and another light with the standard 7" reflector behind him for separation (more noticeable in the wider shots).

These two were for the cover. We ended up using only the top one. (It's pretty clear that the bottom one is of the editor of the paper). The story was about binge drinking. We chose Jim Beam for its color - it gave us a great color palette throughout. For lighting the bottom one, I used one softbox from directly above him, with another a stop or two down off to camera right for fill. For the top one I just nuked the background with a couple of lights.

This one was fun. It's a massive photoshop project, nearly a 1 gig file. There are some things that need to be fixed, I'll admit -- a lot of the reflections need to be redone. But as far as a pure photoshop creation I thought it went pretty well. We shot them standing on a black table in front of a series of chalk boards, which I extended in photoshop using samples from an image without the students, along with bringing the table back to meet them and adding the horizontal bar where they meet. For the actual lighting, I used two skim lights from either side, along with 2 softboxes right next to each other (to simulate a bigger one) about 10-15 feet above my head. I'm a good distance back from the students as well, maybe 20 feet. The students were members of the medical club, and the photo was for an advice piece that ran in the commentary section of the paper. Huge shout out to my assistants Riley and Michael for helping set this one up.

For this one, the story was about a language being phased out. I had a strobe bounced off the walls to the left and right. I popped the strobes when the shutter opened, then had the students leave the frame during a long exposure, giving the ghosting. A little photoshop later and I'm done.

I'm looking forward to the next issue... but for now, here are a couple of tearsheets: