@davidbergman

On Thursday I photographed the band Emmure at the Blender Theatre in New York City.

It was a pretty typical shoot and I love when this happens. I show up to shoot a band. They don’t know me from Adam, nor should they. I’m just another photographer that has to take their picture for some magazine.

It helps that today’s shoot is for Kerrang, since these guys all want the publicity. But I know that bands are usually all about the music and like doing the photo shoot shuffle about as much as most people enjoy a root canal. I try to make it painless, but I still need some cooperation on their part.

I show up with all my lights in tow and start talking to them about different picture possibilities. We don’t have too many options because we’re locked in a venue and they don’t want to go outside. So, I’ll say something like “Wouldn’t it be cool if we took the barricades from the front of the stage and stack them behind you,” or “How about if I light it like this and put you guys over here?”

Sometimes they don’t think it will work or they want to do something else so I’ll use my Jedi mind trick (“These are not the ‘droids you’re looking for”) to get them to go along with my idea.

I get everything set up and take a test frame. Because I’m shooting with strobes, they really can’t see what the photo is going to look like until they see the actual image. Thanks to digital technology, I can show them the picture immediately on the back of the camera. Here’s the good part. Most of the time, they go, “Oh man, that’s cool!”

 

From there it’s smooth sailing. They trust me now and will go along with whatever I want. “Hey, can you stand up on those two rickety tables in the middle?” No problem.

 

At the end, the guys told me this was the best batch of photos they’ve ever had done. Of course, they only saw them on an un-calibrated, 3-inch screen, but I’ll take it. I certainly don’t think this particular shoot was my best work ever, but I accomplished what I wanted and got in and out without having to pull out my dentist’s drill.

Saturday morning I headed out in a rental Toyota 4-runner to shoot Virginia at Princeton lacrosse for Sports Illustrated.

I knew I was in trouble when I checked weather.com the night before. The spot where they show a little Denny’s picture menu icon to tell you what to expect was a big cloud with huge drops coming off of it. I think it actually wet my monitor.

On the drive down it was only raining a little bit. By the time I got to Princeton Stadium, the floodgates had opened.

I was smart enough to rent an SUV so that I could unload my gear while standing underneath the open hatch. However it doesn’t help too much when the rain is coming in at a 90 degree angle.

I bagged my gear up, hermetically sealed myself in plastic, and grabbed an umbrella.

I think I’ve shot lacrosse 3 or 4 times at Princeton and it’s ALWAYS raining. What’s that about? I wonder what that place looks like in sunlight?

Anyway, I parked myself in a corner and sat down on the track around the field. I’ve never done this, but I actually opened my umbrella and kept it over my head while I was shooting. Since I was staying in one spot, it worked pretty well! I didn’t even need my rain hood.

My gear was fine until the temperature went up about 10 degrees in the span of 5 seconds. No joke. This blast of warm air came in and while it felt good to not be freezing anymore, my lenses didn’t react well to the shift. A layer of condensation deposited itself on my front element and wouldn’t go away.

I thought I had imagined the temperature change, but I looked around and all of the photographers and TV guys were desperately wiping their lenses.

For most of the fourth period, I was able to shoot in 20 second bursts until the lens had to be cleaned again.

I’ve always said that if the weather is going to be bad, then please be horrendous because it makes better pictures. It almost doesn’t matter what’s happening in the photo if there’s a blizzard or monsoon out there. It’ll always look cool.

After surviving that storm, I got home with just enough time to take a quick shower and go downtown to shoot the taping of a standup comedy show for Comedy Central called Live at Gotham.

I did this job as a favor for my friend, photographer Brian Friedman (the money doesn’t hurt either!). They were taping for four nights and he had a conflict on Saturday and asked me to fill in.

The job was fun. I did 30-second portraits of each of the two hosts for the night, Rich Vos and Kevin Hart. The funny thing is that I just watched the movie 40-year-old Virgin on my iPhone a couple of days ago and Kevin is one of the stars. Turns out he’s as nice as he is funny.

One of the comedians was T.J. Miller. He’s the guy who holds the camera in the movie Cloverfield. He did a really funny bit about people who use inappropriate Asian expressions in conversations.

I had to put a “blimp” on my camera to shoot during the show. The blimp goes around the camera and lens to (mostly) silence the sound of the shutter so the audience watching at home doesn’t hear me snapping away.

The industry standard is a hard version (the Jacobson blimp) and it’s what is always used on movie sets. I don’t need one very often so I have a less-expensive soft blimp (Sam Cranston’s Camera Muzzle) that works pretty well.

My only issue with it is that after you have your hand inside of this contraption for a few minutes, it’s gets awfully sweaty in there. Yuck.

But I can’t complain. It’s always cool when you can get paid to watch comedy all night.

Yesterday I went down to The Living Room, a very cool music space in Tribeca, to shoot a band called Dead to Fall. They’re a metalcore band from Chicago and Minneapolis.

Why does it seem that the heavier the music, the nicer the guys are who play it? These guys couldn’t have been cooler. I’m sure they’re nuts on stage, but I found them to be relatively normal.

Hope I didn’t just ruin their image.

We started in the club and I used a beat up red wall as the backdrop. I usually like to start with something simple so I can get to know them a bit and we can all get warmed up.

 

After I felt good about the red wall, I took them and my lights outside. The guys immediately gravitated toward a tractor that was sitting on the street. There was also a shopping cart next to it and Jon, the lead singer, jumped right in.

With traffic flowing down the street, they spent some time playing around on that tractor. Jon wrote the word “HELP” on a piece of cardboard and the guys looked like out of work musicians.

At the end, he lit the sign on fire, although it never really turned into a big enough flame to look good in the photo. For safety sake, we’re probably all better off that way.

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I spent the better part of the day Thursday at Madison Square Garden.

In the afternoon, I did portraits of the band Chiodos. They were opening for Linkin Park that night.

When I emailed the tour manager in advance, he told me that the band didn’t have their bus because of construction around the arena and that they’d have to stay in the general area. No problem. I’m used to showing up and trying to find something interesting for a photo.

I told him I’d arrive early and scout out a location nearby.

I know the MSG area pretty well and have always wanted to shoot in front of the giant post office across the street. This isn’t just any post office. It spans two full city blocks, sits on eight acres, and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It also boasts the longest giant order Corinthian colonnade in the world. It says so in wikipedia, so it must be true.

The point is that the front is beautiful and would make for a great photo. I wasn’t sure if I’d be allowed to shoot there without a permit, but we could make it quick.

So the shoot time comes and I call the tour manager. He says it’s too cold outside and there are too many fans around.

There goes that idea. I’ll save it for another band over the summer.

So on to Plan B.

Inside the arena, we had to tread lightly for two reasons. First, Chiodos is the support band so we didn’t want to get in the way of anyone from Linkin Park’s crew while they were setting up the stage.

Also, the Garden has very strict union rules and they don’t generally allow photography lighting backstage without paying a lot of money to a union electrician. I really don’t understand it, but that’s the way it is.

I figured I could shoot with four small Nikon speedlights because they don’t require any power from the wall.

There are six guys in the band, which is always tough to shoot. But I found a spot where there were six pay phones. Actually there were only four phones, but it looks like there were six there at some point.

 

We shot that setup and another one right nearby in the span of about 20 minutes.

Everyone was happy.

That evening, I shot the concert. Unfortunately someone forgot to tell the lighting tech that Chiodos was on stage. There was almost no light on them. I was able to make a few frames with the Nikon D3 at ISO 6400 (which looks amazing for what it is), but the quality of the light was horrible.

 

Luckily, Linkin Park’s lighting was great. They’re always fun to shoot because Chester and the boys have so much energy. I shot my three songs and went home.

 

I’ve always been a huge fan of Apple Computers. The first time I touched a computer was in the early 80’s when my folks brought home a state-of-the-art Apple IIE. Man, that thing was cool. BASIC programming language and hours of Castle Wolfenstein. Does it get any better?

Well of course it does. I’ve owned Macs my entire professional life and can’t imaging using anything else. I currently work on a number of different Mac laptops and hook my MacBook Pro up to a 30″ cinema display when I’m in my office

Over the past few years I’ve done some speaking for Apple both here in NYC and on national tours.

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to be invited along with 10 other photographers to the mother ship — Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA. This photo was taken right out by the big “1″ in front of 1 Infinite Loop.

In the group were top photographers from the wedding, sports, photojournalism, and portraiture fields. They asked us about the state of the industry and what we need our software to do.

We were dubbed the Aperture Advisory Board.

Fast forward a few months. This week Apple announced the release of the newest version of it’s pro level photo software – Aperture 2.0. Many of the new features in there are a direct result of our feedback.

Not only am I happy to be a part of this elite group, but I’m thrilled that Apple actually listened to the needs of professional photographers. I sat down with the people who actually write the code and discussed the give-and-take that happens with every feature addition. I certainly have a new respect for the work that the software engineers do.

Aperture 2.0 is now a daily part of my workflow. The program boasts over 100 new features, but the biggest improvements are in image quality and speed. It can handle anything that I throw at it.

I used to believe that the camera manufacturer’s software would always do the best job decoding RAW files. I’m a changed man. The Apple team has worked incredibly hard to decode and decipher every bit and byte in the RAW files to make our images look their absolute best.

You can read all about Aperture and the new features here. They’ve also dropped the price to $199 (it was $499 when the program was first introduced!) and there’s even a free 30-day trial available.