September 20, 2015
There are moments in life that just resonate with you. Moments where you stop, you pause, and you feel your soul being filled. So much about this weekend filled my creative soul, it filled my intellectual bucket and at times it blew my mind.
I had the honor of watching Gregory Heisler speak about his journey, of watching him work with models on stage in front of us and his technique for capturing that unique portrait. I had the honor of listening to the practical and vastly different approaches to business by Zack Arias and David Hobby, how persistence and differentiation pay off. And I had the honor of watching Joe McNally take a mundane auditorium and turn it into a concert stadium and a crime scene all through inventive lighting techniques with a few strobes, some gels, and a keen eye for how to achieve that masterpiece when you can’t control your overall environment.
And my mind was blown away.
I learned so much. And I realized that even after a four year hiatus from corporate work, I still get the business side. I can still keep up with the big ideas, the vision, the differentiators and apply it to my own life in its appropriate scale. It felt good to stretch my brain again. It felt good to make myself uncomfortable and force myself past it. And it was AH-MAZ-ING to watch these icons tackle their work.
I took only a handful of crappy photos with my phone (I purposefully left my camera at home because I was there to listen, take notes and engage at a different level). But here is Joe McNally pulling together a portrait that ended up looking like the guy was a guitarist on stage. He had a blue light firing at the back of the auditorium so the subjects his silhouette is framed in blue, a red light firing off the guitar that highlighted the neck of it, an orange light firing off to the side onto the subjects face to give a “stage light feel” and a white light firing onto the front row of the audience to barely show the faces in a crowd. There was also a small handheld smoke machine behind the subject to add a little depth for the light to work through . The guy looked like he was on stage at a concert AND WE WERE IN A BORING CORPORATE AUDITORIUM.
Mind. Blown.
