In the United Kingdom
Early this year, United Kingdom-based photographer Dan Prince was contacted by Manchester advertising agency, BJL to create a campaign for the National Bingo Game Association. The goal of the project was to make playful and fun, caricature-style portraits for National Bingo’s Supersized Bingo campaign.
UK production company JDPL handled all aspects of props, cast, costumes and production, while Nick Humphries was brought onboard to retouch.
Needless to say, the retouching for this project was fairly extensive and specific. After the initial studio shoot, there was a lot of back and forth with the client and agency to make sure everything was just right. Nick had to continually make minuscule tweaks to keep the images whimsical and fun, while not coming off as creepy. It was a challenging act to balance, but the effort paid off in the end.
Dan recounts his favorite part of the shoot was working with his subjects.
I really enjoyed shooting the characters…I love working with people and knowing we were going to manipulate them in a style I had not created in the past.
One of Dan’s photos as it appeared on National Bingo Game’s social media.
See more of Dan at danprince.co.uk
In New York City
Food photographer David Arky got a call from Photo Editor Ronnie Well about doing a shoot for an upcoming editorial piece about the state of politics in America for The Wall Street Journal. Ronnie and Art Director Keith Webb had already come up with the idea: they wanted to have David shoot elephant and donkey-shaped cookies to illustrate the Democrat and Republican parties. They wanted to show each cookie breaking apart to reflect the sentiment of the article. David himself mused on the subject.
How do you complement a piece on the disintegration of traditional politics without turning off an audience already sated with the subject? Find the sweet spot. Likening the crumbling of politics-as-usual to “how the cookie crumbles” created a wry, inviting metaphor—a tongue-in-cheek teaser to their weighty editorial that was, quite literally, appetizing.
While in theory breaking up a cookie seems to be a fairly easy action, it turned out to be a much more complicated endeavor.
Kellie Murphy, the prop stylist, baked fifteen elephants and donkeys each, in an attempt to get perfect versions of both animals. When they began to break the cookies, they realized it was surprisingly difficult to get them to crumble and still maintain a likeness of the original political mascot. After some trial and error, David’s assistant, Bryant Carmona came up with a method to break up the cookies without compromising the integrity of the shape and keep the crumbs from flying all over the studio. After perfecting the crumbling process, David was able to select the perfect cookies from the batch and photograph them in various stages of breakage.
Here’s how the final image appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s website.
See more of David at Arky.com!
In Miami
When Miami-based photographer Thomas Winter received a call from Mitch Friedman at The Point Group to shoot a Kisco Senior Living Resort in La Posada, he was game.
The concept of the shoot was to portray seniors at the Kisco Center, living life without skipping a beat. That here could be a chance for them to continue enjoying the good life throughout their senior years. Thomas decided to create a series of environmental portraits that showed the active lifestyle of real community residents. Most importantly, he wanted the pictures to relate back to the career of the residents, or something they’re actively involved in today. Videographers, Steve Martine and Jimmy Crocco were also hired to make an accompanying video feature for the campaign.
Since the pictures were going to be framed around each resident’s specific interest, Thomas needed to find and secure the locations that would fit those narratives.
Thomas scouted the premises beforehand to make sure the sites were available so that everything would go smoothly.
They did encounter one minor setback Thomas could not possibly have planned for.
We had a brief period of frustration when we wern’t permitted to fly our drone because Air Force One was in the area.
Aside from that, the shoot went off without a hitch.
Thomas enjoyed this shoot, especially because it allowed him the opportunity to work with real people as opposed to professional talent.
It’s aways so genuine and real. And you really don’t know what you will get. Surprises come from unexpected directions.
This authenticity made for some great commercially viable images and the client was very pleased with the outcome.
See more of Thomas at thomaswinter.com