DAY 365

PORTRAITS

Interior Location

MICHAEL GRAVES, ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER

Meeting and photographing Michael Graves was in itself an honor and pleasure—a commission to make images that would appear on a front cover of a magazine was an added bonus. This image was shot in his house in Princeton, New Jersey, where he created a museum of sorts and homage to the concept of the “Grand Tour,” showing off antiques and objets d’art that he had collected on his trips to Europe.

The challenge in this portrait was to allow enough space for the magazine’s cover logo and feature lines as well as lighting Michael and the background with the right balance of color and contrast. In reality, this was a tight space to shoot in and did not allow enough space to set up many lights, so I bounced two small strobe lights off walls into the room and used a medium soft box as my key light for the portrait. The tulips were a colorful addition to the foreground table and later were sampled as a color of the cover’s logo and font.

This was a very successful shoot and a good example of making a location work for you as a background for a location shoot and portrait setting. —SA