From Jay Leno to Portraits to Commercial

By Gary Bernstein

Although it was never my desire to be a celebrity photographer, I’ve seen my share of celebs over the years – about 200 of them to be more accurate. I just always wanted to take pictures of people and more than that, I wanted to thrill people with their own image. It feels great (doesn’t it?!) – and they buy a ton of images which also feels great.

As you know from personal experience, however, that “thrilling” part is always the challenge. Trust me, nobody is more difficult to please than a celebrity client - ego aside – not the least of which is because they are rarely paying for their own photo-sessions - they simply tell their management or their clients who they want to be photographed by – and they have their choice of every shooter out there! So, in this blog we will cover some of the techniques and tricks you can use to make your pictures stronger and hopefully more “thrilling” for all your clients.

I learned a long time ago to treat all my subjects as though they were celebrities whether it was a 80-year-old grandma or a newcomer actor who was just hoping to break into the entertainment biz. One of those newcomers (back in the day) was a guy named Jay Leno who I photographed for free; and I have photographed Jay from the days when nobody knew him right through his stint at the Tonight Show and beyond. Here is an early Leno shot from my collection of images at www.GaryBernsteinStudio.com. I had a huge American Flag in my studio (about 30’ across), and I loved using it as a background (and so did my clients). You can do the same thing with the Denny background below (which is really much cooler than my flag because it incorporates editorial gray allowing far greater versatility in terms of subject placement and composition):

The Leno image was taken on Kodachrome (yes, that’s film ;)) with a short telephoto on a 35mm SLR; a main light at 11:00, and two lights illuminating the flag in the background (placed at 45-degree angles), and a small, silvered reflector was positioned below Jay’s face to fill in the shadows.

I am not big on rules for photography. If it looks good, I shoot it (as long as it works – which is decided solely by your client after the shoot). But throughout my writing here at Denny, I give you suggestions that can “start you off in the right direction” or hopefully will fine tune an already successful career or at least give food for thought. One classic rule of photography is that you don’t position the subject in the center of the frame (most of the time). Wow…Leno is positioned dead center in this photograph! So, rules are meant to be broken apparently.

This next image - a father-daughter photograph was made as part of a holiday family photo session. The image was made using 2 lights in softboxes as double main lights. One box was placed about 3 feet high to camera left, with the second at 6 feet to camera right. I went for a tight crop on this (which allows for great scrutiny of the subjects, while it also reduces the sale of larger format images – give a little, lose a little).

We had just shot the image below of the same daughter with her brother; however, in this case, I took the children outside and placed them under an open awning using only natural light for the image (and a reflector). Yes, studio lighting and artificial lighting can be made to look the exact same way (fortunately).

I had photographed these same children years earlier in my studio against a beautiful Denny background with a large red contemporary chair as a prop…

…and yes, it resulted in the sale of a large (60”) canvas portrait for their home. This is, in fact, the portrait:

As it turns out, these handsome family members are the husband and children of the famous Beverly Hills makeup maven, Valerie, and below are two of the ads I made for her salon in Beverly Hills using actual clients as models: