Up to Speed, Part 1: Working With Luke

So many things have happened in the last couple of months that it would be downright irresponsible of me to cram it all into one entry.  In light of that, I'm going to dedicate this post solely to my experience working for Luke Duval / Decades Magazine, and I'll try to sum up everything else in the next one.

For the whole month of April, I worked at Milk Saturday-Monday, and assisted Luke Tuesday-Friday.  Every day was another shoot, and they were all very different.  Some of them were beauty or fashion spreads that had themes like hair trends or accessories, and a few had more developed stories.  I think only 3 of the shoots were on location, the rest were done in Luke's apartment against a seamless backdrop.  My job mostly involved setting up all the lights and the backdrop, metering for the right exposure to set up for the first shot, doing various research assignments while we waited for hair and makeup, assisting during the shoot by holding a fan/fixing the garment/holding an object in place/etc., running errands, ordering lunch for everybody, picking up/dropping off things for the wardrobe stylist, putting all the lights and the backdrop away after every shoot, sweeping/mopping after everyone else left, and generally making myself useful if none of the above things needed to be done at the moment.  It was a lot of work, and we worked long hours--we usually started at 8am (sometimes 7), and we didn't usually finish until 7 or 8pm (one night we went until 10)--but I was grateful for every second of it because I learned a lot.

It was fascinating to watch Luke work.  I've always been the kind of person who does things by feel--I've never been the technical type, so I'm usually not so concerned with method and theory, I just do whatever feels right.  I'm lucky that I have a good eye and that I generally know what I want, but if I ever had to plan something out entirely in my head, or if I ever had to give specific lighting directions to someone else without doing it myself, I'm not sure I could do it because I just don't think that way.  Luke, by comparison, has light down to a science.  He knows exactly what he wants, and he knows exactly how to get it.  He wasn't always so good at explaining himself, and he would sometimes get frustrated when we couldn't follow his train of thought from the half-baked directions he gave, but the results were always mind-blowing.  For example, we did a night shoot at the Waldorf Astoria, and there was one shot he wanted against a bunch of mirrors with the female model looking sad and forlorn (the spread was kind of a romance story).  To add drama to the scene, Luke wanted to cast shadows on the model's face to create sort of a noir-esque mystique, so he told Brad (his first assistant) to basically do shadow puppets in front of the key light that was directed at her face.  The whole thing felt a little silly because none of us could really picture what this was supposed to look like, but when we saw what he'd gotten from it, we were speechless.

That was one thing that was really interesting to me actually--the little tricks used to achieve high fashion looks.  It's all smoke and mirrors.  Looking at the end results from the shoot at the Waldorf, it would be impossible to guess that the source of the complicated shadows in the image was as simple as someone making shadow puppets.  On another shoot, I was instructed to hold a little cake-shaped jewelry box on the model's head and stand sideways behind her so I wouldn't be in the shot, because the box was too heavy to secure to her head.  The hair styles were especially impressive to me; the stylist used all sorts of extensions and hair rats to build these elaborate sculptures that would have been totally impossible without the hidden elements.  Looking at these pictures, it's easy to assume that everything is as it appears, when in reality, if the camera was moved over to the side just a little bit, you'd see that everything is fragile, held in place temporarily.  Much like the photograph itself, the look is fleeting, and the image captures a moment and a look that cannot last much longer than the duration of the shutter firing.

Luke went back to LA at the end of April, and then spent June and July abroad in Paris and London to do the rest of the shoots for the first issue.  I was actually invited to come along and be on the team for Paris and London, and Luke even offered to help cover airfare, but unfortunately the timing couldn't have been worse for me, and I wouldn't really have been able to afford it anyway, so I had to decline.  I had feared that that might be the last I'd hear from him, but I actually just got an email from his wife last night asking if I'd be interested in assisting on a celebrity shoot in August, so I'm very excited for that.  I'm looking forward to getting to work with him again.

In the interest of keeping these posts at a reasonable length, I'm going to stop there and pick up where I left off in the next one.  So what are you waiting for?  Head on over to Part 2!