We’re Back and Why We Never Left with Actress Harlan Drum and her breakout role in "Sweet Magnolias"
Creating during Covid-19:
When the shelter in place and self-isolation credo came down, I took it to mean that I had to continue to create, just in a different way… Check out my “Corona Bubble Boy” series on Instagram.
I don’t see Creating during the pandemic as much different than working on many of our shoots. Of course there are new challenges to solve, guidelines to follow, and procedures to be fastidious about.
I’m continually striving towards becoming a better, more creative, and true to myself photographer and storyteller.
Thought I’d share my thoughts and a new cover we produced and photographed for the Summer edition of Venice magazine during the Covid-19 pandemic. We featured the actress Harlan Drum from the Netflix series Sweet Magnolias.
I received a text from the Publisher on Sunday, Father’s Day, inquiring if we thought we could pull off a strong cover shoot by Wednesday. Retouching had to be completed immediately following, as the magazine was printing that Friday.
I jumped at the opportunity and had my team together by Monday.
A smaller team; tighter, and amazingly talented.
Our wardrobe stylist, Danny, hit it out of the park for us. He put together the perfect wardrobe, when none of the usual sources were renting or lending due to Covid-19.
Leslie, our makeup artist, has her own line of cosmetics called Beauty for Real. She utilizes a small warehouse & showroom in Miami, which was perfect for our shoot. Here we could ensure the status of the environment and shoot without any uncontrollable risk.
Gianluca styled the hair, he’s already known as a genius in his field and he did an amazing job for us.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without Harlan. She exploded on set and gave us a wide range of looks. Always willing to do whatever we asked… at one point we had her screaming at the top of her lungs for several minutes!
We garnered three distinctly different looks and finally settled on the one cover image. Our Publisher/Creative Director, Carlos, complimented us by saying that we had provided too many great options… the decision for which image to use for the cover was extremely challenging.
Here are a couple of BTS images and a little story behind the shoot.
All the Behind the Scenes photos were taken by Sherryl Kamper.
A special note about being prepared for our shoot:
Everyone was notified in advance that we would be adhering to safety protocols and would have PPE on hand. Hand sanitizer was readily available on set, behind the set, and generally flowed everywhere…
Everyone’s temp was taken as a condition of entry and written down on their respective releases.
Very limited craft was available. Separate coffee, individual creams and sugar packets, small individually wrapped snacks were also available in limited supply.
