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Looking to add celebrity portraiture to his repertoire, Appleton, WI-based photographer David E Jackson reached out to the management team of writer, cookbook author and TV personality, Ted Allen. (You may recognized Ted from being the food and wine guy on Bravo’s hit show Queer Eye, or as the host of Food Network’s Chopped.) After initial contact from David, Ted and his team browsed David’s portfolio and, loving his style, saw an opportunity to update their own publicity images for online and printed materials. So, they called David up and set up a shoot while Ted was in Milwaukee promoting his new book. A “win-win” in David’s opinion.
David was looking forward to the shoot, seeing it as a great opportunity to start branching out into the celebrity portraiture world; and, after watching a fair amount of Chopped, he could tell that Ted was “genuinely a great guy.” However, all this didn’t calm his pre-shoot jitters,
Of course, shooting a network celebrity for the first time was a little nerve racking. But once he walked into the room, I could breath easy. He was just a regular dude. Super easy to work with, constant jokes. In fact, we talked more than we shot. This is so important; great work and business growth stems from building honest relationships with clients and just being able to hang out as normal dudes.
Even if Ted was a “normal” dude to David, the shoot was still somewhat atypical for him—especially in it’s time constraints,
This was different from most of my assignments, as I was fairly limited with time. We managed to get about twenty minutes with Ted, as the shoot took place just before his book signing. Truth be told, we knew we had roughly a 30 minute window, but ended up with 20. Situations like this, I typically plan on having about 1/3 the time we’re told.
Though is a was a short shoot, it was still a sweet one according to David. He’s happy to have shots to put into his new celebrity portfolio which he hopes to continue cultivating so he can work with agencies that promote network television shows and create movie collateral. Also, Ted now has some nice new images for his own publicity use as well. A win-win.