Monday, September 23, 2013

Pinhole headshots for McCann Blue

Over the years Ive done lots of work for McCann, here in Dublin and more recently with art director Ray Swan. So when he commissioned me to shoot a charity ad for the Irish Cancer Society, we had a chance to catch up. The big news was that McCann Dublin had joined with Blue Cube to form McCann Blue.

Ray told me that he needed headshots for everyone in the new agency and we began to discuss ideas for what we could do. His brief was driven by the need to try and express the 2 agencies' and their different areas of expertise.
McCann is a long established global agency from the 'traditional' model and and Blue Cube is a digital agency so we thought it would be interesting to bring together 2 technologies representing each direction. One grass roots and one new era. And so was born....the Leaf Aptus II Biscuit tin Pinhole Camera !


All we needed to do now was to find a way to make it work! We needed to build a camera that didn't need a 2 hour exposure! I shoot with the LEAF back using my Mamiya RZ67 camera and lenses so I had already worked out that we would still need the camera and a lens to trigger the back and fire the flash. So the shoot set up required the pin hole camera attached to the LEAF via its leads and the camera on a separate tripod with a pocket wizard to fire the flash. The Pinhole was made in a piece of black wrap, (matt black tinfoil basically) and had an aperture of something like f200. A very small hole indeed so we needed a lot of light. I used my Profoto D2400 on full power. The light was a Pro Head and what we liked to call the 'Frankenstein'. This is the insane marriage of a Profoto disc reflector and the Bowens Supersoft 600 and sunlight reflectors riveted together to form a large round and very deep diffused reflector. The light is soft but directional, a little like a small octobox but with the contrast of a diffused beauty dish.

Check McCann Blue's blog about it here. 








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