Rangefinder Magazine
April 2005

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The Last Word by David Paul Bayles

Grant Gershon is the conductor/director of The Los Angeles Master Chorale, the 120-voice choir that performs in the recently completed Disney Music Hall in downtown L.A. The new music hall was designed by architect Frank Gehry and is an architectural marvel, with its swooping stainless steel exterior. This photograph was made for the Master Chorale’s 2005/2006 season brochure.

I’ve made photographs for the Chorale for the last four years. With the new Music Hall and other new downtown venues open, all arts organizations were collectively making a visual appeal to come enjoy downtown L.A. at night. Downtown Los Angeles has been considered mostly a business district with not much to do after business hours. With that in mind I suggested this shot to the marketing and creative directors when we walked around the building and talked about the images they needed for the brochure.

I’m sure you know the feeling when an idea just pops out of your mouth and as soon as it does the technical/skeptical side of you is trying to pull it back in. That was the case here. Both directors liked the idea and now I had to be sure I could pull it off. Luckily, the maestro is a willing player in all our photographic endeavors.

After all the permits had been obtained from the Disney Music Hall and the cab company willingly placed their product, we set a date. It rained, and rained and rained. The third rainiest year in L.A.’s history. Eventually that proved to be a good thing, because the clouds and atmosphere on the day we finally were able to shoot was stellar.

My old Mamiya RB 67 was on my big Gitzo tripod about nine feet in the air, loaded with Polaroids and a 65mm lens. We were there two hours early, to pick the exact spot we wanted. I had assistants and marketing directors stand in for the maestro, and we taped down the spot on the sidewalk where he had to be. I had a Norman 400B on a stand triggered by a PocketWizard to key-light his face and give a stage-like spotlight on the ground. With an incident meter we set the key light to f/11 and sandbagged it in place so it would stay f/11 all through the 7- to 8-minute window I expected to shoot in.

Using Fuji NPS and a spot meter, I continually checked the buildings, sky and sidewalk values until they all fell into the range of the film. We called Grant on his cell, and he came out of his suite in the Hall to begin the session. We began shooting at one second at f/11. I had Grant take one step toward the tape as I exposed frame after frame. I shot some with him still as a back up. Movement is always a mystical component and backing up your ideas is a good process. As the sky darkened and the exposures became 3–4 seconds long, I employed the little-known rear curtain sync feature on the Mamiya RB. You didn’t know about that? I disconnected the sync cord from the camera, signaled Grant to hit his mark, hit the cable release and counted 1, 1000, 2, 1000—at 4 my assistant triggered the PocketWizard, and I closed the shutter. Voilá, rear-curtain sync on a 20-year old camera. With each of these exposures I had to wait for the traffic light at Grand and Temple to send the cars my way. With my arm raised, everyone down the sidewalk waited in place. I would lower my arm as a signal to all the marketing and creative directors and chorale staffers to begin walking through the scene.

As a finale I thanked Grant for his patience, and he left in tux and tails to perform a piano recital at the Mark Taper Forum. I switched to Fuji NPL and exposed film up to 30 seconds without him in the scene. Of course we all hoped to get it perfect on one frame, but my final back up was to digitally composite the best elements to suit our needs. Tungsten film would give me another look and color palette to work with.

In the end I used four negatives. One of the entire scene, one for the people on the sidewalk and two for Grant. The primary image of Grant was a sharp one that I selectively motion blurred in Photoshop and the other were the tails of his tux that flew perfectly on another image where the rest of him was too blurred.