Behind the Shot: Twenty Twenty | Carrie Murray

This shoot holds a super special place in my heart. Being a native New Yorker, I felt like this was my homecoming to show my old city how my dreams came true.

The process before this shoot was the most planned and intricate I had ever done. I created a shot list by location of spots we wanted to get photos at. I visited the city the day before my shoot to scope out all the spots and note specific cross streets we’d want to use for the best vantage points. And it was during that trip that I came across this little gem.

On the brink of a new decade, the building number jumped out at me while I was walking around the Financial District in the morning.

Twenty Twenty. 2020. Perfection.

The day of Carrie’s shoot turned out to be overcast. It used to be a dream of mine to have cloud cover on photoshoot days since the daylight is nice and even and soft.

But ever since I started painting with light, I realized that soft and even light also means it leaves my subjects kind of flat against their background and I’m all about the dimension nowadays. We were going to have to make her pop another way.

THE STRATEGY:

1) PINK!

Carrie brought a few outfit changes for her shoot, which we did end up incorporating later in the day. But on a gray day, I really wanted her bubbly personality to come out. So we took a LOT of photos with her pink coat.

It will also make it easier for her to plan content later. Her main brand color is pink and so I wanted to make sure there was some sort of common thread that would tie an otherwise gloomy photo into a bright and colorful grid.

2) Point my lens up

This rarely a great point of view for your subjects, but in this case I really wanted to play into the fact that the new decade was something BIG. I also knew Carrie was going to use these photos in the next step of her business so it carried that something-big-and-ginormous-is-on-the-horizon meaning across multiple points.

Different angles of the same shot carry a different message and I love to experiment with that facet of storytelling. I’ll be doing a post later showing the difference between what one angle says vs. another.

3) The pose

When it comes to poses, I want my clients to feel comfortable and not look like they’re posing too much. When I give them direction, I often aim to try and capture the moment in between a movement so that it is almost unposed on the way to a pose.

That being said, I wanted to make sure her stance said something along the lines of, “I’m in charge and I mean business,” so I had her grab her coat firmly. I also had her stand straight up against the wall because slouching is even less appealing in photos than real life.

My only criticism of this shot was that I didn’t get a horizontal version. I know I tried but either her legs or the numbers were going to get cut off at the edge and it just didn’t look that great. There were also cars and distracting storefronts when I went wide. I opted to make sure that we kept Carrie and the numbers the main focal point.

Sometimes, you just have to work with what you’ve got. Criticisms aside, we got some gold.