My cover assignment for Fort Worth Weekly‘s coverage of the independent film Ticked Off Trannies With Knives involved shooting two performers, one director and one protester. I was able to shoot the film’s antagonist, Tom Zembrod, and protester and transgender person, Kelli Busey, in my studio. But Krystal, star of the film, and my cover subject, and Israel Luna, the film’s writer/director, had to be shot on location in Dallas.

My assistant, Amber Roark, and I met Summers at S4 in Oak Lawn at 8 p.m. We had an hour to unload, schlep the lights up a flight of stairs, set up, shoot and tear down.

Summers met us at the back entrance of the club and ushered us to the stage where we set up lights while she vanished into her dressing room to get into costume and makeup.

Fort Worth Weekly art director, Andrea Brentz, and I had discussed a cover that would be evocative of the pulp fiction novel covers of the 50s. Beyond that, Brentz gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted with the subjects. The goal with Krystal, as heroine, Bubbles Clicquot, was to depict a powerful and angry woman.

We lit Krystal with one of the Profoto 600 monolights in a 36-inch softbox as our main light. We used two blue-gelled Nikon speedlights for a rim light on her hair and left side to separate her from the dark background.

Brentz photoshopped in the blood-stained knife clutched in Summers’ right hand.

This and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my searchable online archive:

I had a few minutes at the Meyerson this afternoon with Hamlisch who’s in town to promote the DSO’s pops series. Hamlisch will be conducting the series and intends to feature American composers. For Mark Lowry’s story on Hamlisch, go to TheaterJones.com.

Hamlisch, a child prodigy who attended Juilliard as a seven-year-old, is one of two humans to win The Oscar, The Emmy, The Grammy, The Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. The other is Oscar Hammerstein.

We shot in the Meyerson’s green room, which is your basic DARK space with rich mahogany-colored walls. This was going to be an interview session, which meant I’d shoot while my colleague, Mark Lowry of TheaterJones.com, asked questions. While 11 minutes might sound like a short time, anyone who works with celebrities knows it’s more than enough time to make a nice portrait.

I make it a point to arrive at least an hour early to every shoot. I like to see the space well ahead of time and set up lights, test, and correct early. Typically, I have an assistant with me to help but none of my favorites were available today, so I schlepped the gear myself–with Mark’s help.

I used a 48-inch softbox with a Profoto 600 monolight camera-right and a white tri-fold reflector camera-left, just an inch or two outside the frame. Hamlisch, 65, had been up and running since 5 a.m. and was grateful for a few minutes to sit before walking into the Mort’s foyer for a evening-long reception.

Hamlisch is ever the gentleman and a delight to work with. His face lit up when he talked about the master class he’ll teach later this month for students at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Hamlisch, the teacher, can’t wait to get in front of those kids.

This and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my searchable online archive:

It’s not every day that you’re in the studio working with one of your long-time friends and favorite models when 360 West magazine art director, Meda Kessler, emails and writes, “Hey, shoot me a photo of Hendrick’s Gin for our upcoming issue. Shoot whatever you like.” Knowing that I keep a bottle of Hendrick’s in the studio at all times, she assumed, correctly, that I’d be eager to come up with something for the June issue.

If you haven’t tried Hendrick’s, you owe it to yourself to get thee to a spirits store post-haste. A long-time fan of Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire, I have now relegated them to mixer status. The art of the martini is a delicate one and for my money, Hendrick’s is the only gin worthy of my shaker.

Now one of the many great things about working with Meda is that she’s all about collaboration. She wants the photographer to bring his or her vision to everything she assigns. It’s why top photographers all over north Texas are clamoring to shoot for her and it’s why her magazine, now in its 14th issue, is so gorgeous to look at. Meda is one of those rare art directors who hires the best then leaves them alone to do what they do.

She does not feel the need to change or tweak or put her mark on a photographer’s work. Those art directors are the bane of any creative shooter’s existence. They are insufferable. There’s a special ring in hell reserved just for them.

So, with model Liz Ashley in the studio in a new Zac Posen tuxedo, we conspired to create the photo you see here. Liz and I had been talking about the tux shoot for more than a year and the Hendrick’s shoot just fell neatly into place.

Every once in a great while the planets align and stuff just seems to work.

This and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my searchable online archive:

Brooks and Dunn gave their final Dallas performance Saturday to a sold-out crowd at Superpages.com Center. While Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks put on one hell of a show, they don’t get that close together onstage–at least not during the first three songs, which is all the promoter will allow photographers to shoot.

My assignment was to photograph both performers in one vertical frame. That image didn’t blow my skirt up but this shot of Ronnie downstage was a nice moment.

This and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my online archive:

NYC playwright, Zayd Dohrn’s, Long Way Go Down will premier tomorrow evening, May 28, 2010, at Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas.

I photographed Dohrn for TheaterJones.com at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary gallery this morning. We made the photo in the gallery space because I wanted a photo of the playwright that had a bit of mood and mystery to it. The shadow behind him is cast by the sculpture “The Way Home” a foam sheet/mixed media piece by artist Kana Harada, whose work is currently on display in the gallery. Harada’s intricate piece dominates the space and it provided a perfect gobo for this shot.

To create the shadow, I lit the sculpture with an SB 600 and green gel off camera right. I wanted the shadow to spill across the white gallery wall behind the subject. Dohrn was lit with an SB 900 in a 15 x 15 softbox, camera left.

Dohrn, 33, is the son of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, members of the ’70s radical movement Weather Underground.

This and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my online archive:

It’s time to saddle-up and head west again. Marfa is holding its third annual film festival May 5-9 and I’ll be there covering it for clients old and new.

Elizabeth Redwine, of Redwine Campaigne, the agency handling publicity for the festival, told me this morning that Lou Reed’s film Red Shirley is featured at the festival and it marks Reed’s directorial debut. Diane Bell, director and writer of Obseldia and many more films, will be on hand as well. The whole festival lineup lists an impressive menu of films and filmmakers. Of course, the best thing about any gathering in Marfa is the opportunity to meet other artists, and the film festival will pack them in.

It’s also an excuse to slide down to Terlingua and sip fine whisky with Blair and hop over to Valentine to check in on Boyd. Although I expect Boyd will turn up at the festival his ownself. In fact, I expect the two of them will make an appearance.

Hey, it only cost a dollar.

Here’s an excellent example of why microstock really lowers the value of your marketing message. Because it isn’t YOUR message. It’s a generic sea of white faces that anyone with a dollar can purchase and brand as their own.

Next time a client says, “But I can get that at microstock for a dollar,” send them to this link.

Thanks to Chris Barton at Fair Trade Photographer for this revealing peek at how microstock sausage gets made.

My first-ever hard drive failure occurred five weeks ago. It came after more than 15 years of digital photography and, like death and taxes, I suppose it was inevitable. Unfortunately, the manner in which it failed meant that it cost me images from a week-long West Texas excursion that I can’t recover. I can re-visit and I can re-shoot but I won’t recover THOSE images.

So, $1,200 and five weeks and multiple missed-deadlines and lost-sales later, I’m left with a harsh lesson: Stuff breaks. More specifically, “Brand new, out-of-the-box G-Tech stuff breaks.”

Did I backup, you ask? Well, no, because I didn’t get the chance to backup. Like most traveling photographers, I carry a compact hard drive that I use to dump images until I’m back in the office and can transfer them to my studio RAID. I’ve used that drive for 18 months with no issues and, in fact, that drive performed perfectly. It was the brand-spanking-new 500 GB G-Tech drive that I transferred those images to that failed.

The back story: On returning from West Texas I purchased the new 500 GB drive because I wanted more traveling capacity and so I could give the 250 GB drive to my son who was returning to college at the end of the week. I transferred the images, 49 gigabytes, to the new drive, cleaned the 250 and handed it to my son.

When I arrived at the studio the next morning and attempted to transfer the images to the RAID, the transfer would time out and ultimately fail. I tried for several hours, ran disk warrior and cursed G-Tech before taking the drive to my local genius bar for a complete diagnostic. They hooked me up with a local data recovery company and a mere $400 and three weeks later, I had 49 gigs of mostly-corrupt, mostly-unusable images from out west.

Yesterday I returned the drive and exchanged it for a 500 GB LaCie. My G-Tech days are done. I’ve ceased cursing the name of the G-Tech CEO, whomever she or he might be. I’ve ceased kicking myself for not testing the new drive first and I’m now at peace with it.

But not really.

This comes, ironically, just three months after I worked as an assistant on a three-day advertising shoot for a colleague. I insisted that we back up everything on two hard drives in the field each day. She didn’t see the need but humored me and I slept soundly after each day’s shooting.

There’s another lesson in here and it has to do with redundancy and flawed processes and accountability. And as a sole-proprietor/owner-operator, I can tell you two things about my boss: He’s a prick and he’s fallible–but he’s infinitely smarter than he was five weeks ago and he’s now backing up on two hard drives in the field.

I made this image in my pasture Thursday, Feb. 11, at 11:30 p.m., while snow was still falling. I was struck by how much ambient light was reflected by the snow. The sky was completely overcast and save for the light above my barn door, off camera right, there was no light source nearby. My neighbor’s porch light is visible in the distance.

It was a 2.5-second exposure at f4, ISO 100.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming and I’ve seen big snow, but never in my back pasture. The stillness was overwhelming–no cars on the streets, so it was silent all around. My part of Texas was sleeping under a 12-inch blanket of downy snow.

During my recent working trip to NYC I was, as always, fascinated its denizens. These are random glimpses of New Yorkers being New Yorkers–and they do it better than anyone else.