Billy Sheahan

The Adventures of a Chicago Photographer

As many of you already know, I’ve had parallel careers the past fifteen plus years of being both a photographer and film editor. In the beginning, I made the decision to keep them separate. While they were both visual artistic expressions, for the most part they seemed to be different entities to me.

I enjoy them both from a creative standpoint. They are both genres of storytelling. They scratch different itches. But for a time I felt them to be distinctly different disciplines.

In the past few years however, I find them to be merging in very unexpected and rewarding ways. More often now, I find myself reaching into these previously different artistic tool boxes and combining them almost without thinking in my creative work.

As a photographer these days, I’m shooting almost as much motion work as still work. As a film editor at The Colonie, I’m incorporating my still photography catalog archives when looking for distinctive images to help tell our stories. Additionally I’m shooting motion photography even when I’ve been hired as a film editor, finding that supplementing the footage I’ve been given to edit, needs a few additional scenes that were not shot. Whatever it takes to tell the story.

The lines are blurring. No longer are my projects specifically a photography project or a film editing project. They have become much broader in scope and I find myself happily surprised that these two seemingly disparate skill sets that have in the past been passing like ships in the night, are not only complimentary, but necessary to my clients, be they my photography clients or my film editing clients.

I find myself in an incredibly fortunate and unique position to be able to use both at the same time. It’s almost like I’ve been independently training to be both a figure skater and a poet and then discovering that the International Olympic Committee has just created a new event called Poetic Figure Skate Reading.

It’s a very exciting time.

This creative mash-up has certainly been challenging from an organizational standpoint and I find myself having to rethink how I approach each creative project. Time and project management has become the largest challenge. I’ve been very close to missing a few deadlines because of the expanding workflow. And with schedules becoming more compressed in recent years it’s become a formidable task to keep everything humming along in an efficient manner.

The critical nature of careful planning before each creative project has only become more vital than it already was. Inventing new workflows sometimes on a project by project basis has become a normal part of the process.

Earlier this month, I found myself inventing a new way to combine Adobe Lightroom with Apple’s Final Cut Pro in my editing suite to manage, prepare and export tens of thousands of photos that had to be organized for a 30 second commercial. Combining my own photographic catalog with thousands of images from another photographer to tell the story. The traditional workflow was simply not up to the task. Sometimes you have to be good and clever.

On the heels of that project, I received footage for my next TV commercial edit, missing a few elements from the shoot because of the overpacked production schedule. This weekend I’m shooting those missing pieces myself to add to the edit as the project proceeds. Again, whatever it takes.

A month ago, one of my best advertising photography clients was putting a new business pitch together. He asked if he could incorporate one of my motion videos I shot last summer to help present the agency’s vision to their prospective client. He saw the video on my photography website. He sent me the product logo artwork and I edited it into my existing footage and in a few days he had a video to add to their successful presentation.

Today I use the same camera to shoot my still work and my motion work. A year ago I didn’t even know it would be possible to do this. My Canon 5D Mark II allows me to use the same lighting, lenses and look that I have developed over many years to create my still photography work – and now suddenly put it all in motion. One minute I’m shooting stills and the next minute I’m shooting HD video with my same signature look. No words can properly express what a turning point that has been in how I approach each project I’m involved with.

Some days I feel like I’ve discovered fire. It’s not an exaggeration.

Over the December holidays, I directed, photographed and edited a music video for Jillian Ann’s first single from her new solo work. I’ve been photographing stills of Jillian for almost ten years and she knew I know what angles and lighting to use to make her look her best. Once again, making the transition to motion was effortless. A month to the day after the first day of principal photography, the video was on it’s way to Cannes, France for the international MIDEM music conference.

I should have the official go ahead to release Jillian’s “Confess” video into the internet wild next month. It actually was posted online for about twelve hours in mid January before her management requested we remove it until the music contracts could be worked out and the roll out of the music single could be synchronized. But in those brief hours of temporary unleashing, the response I received was incredibly overwhelming and gratifying.

Even with that brief glimpse, I’ve gotten more inquires about future directing and editing work than I can take on at the moment. As I often like to say, it’s a bit of an embarrassment of riches.

UPDATE: I just received the go ahead to officially release the “Confess” video. You can view it on my website here, or on Vimeo here.

There are many ways to follow this evolving adventure of mine if you wish:

You can get my Billy Sheahan Photography iPhone App and keep a sample of my photography, editing and directing work in your pocket

Follow me on Twitter

View my Still, Motion photography and Film Editing portfolios on the Billy Sheahan Photography website

Read my Adventures of a Chicago Photographer blog

Stay up to date on my past and future Photography Exhibitions

And soon, the new Billy Sheahan Photography Store will be unveiled if you’d like to own a more tactile and permanent bit of my photography for your very own.

Thanks for all the continued support!

Ok… First a few websites to check voter registration status and all that….

Chicago Board of Elections if you live in the city of Chicago.

If you live in Cook County, but not in Chicago, you’ll want the Cook County Board of Elections site.

If you click on the voter status box, you can check to make sure you’re registered and when the confirmation page comes up, you can download a sample ballot in pdf form that will allow you to see in advance what you will see on Tuesday in the voting booth. Since this is a primary election, you have to choose which party ballot you want to vote, Democratic, Republican or Green Party.

Once you download it, you’ll see a list of all the races you can vote in. Some may seem more important than others, but really, they all affect you and we kind of need people to pay attention to what’s happening from the local to county to federal level. Including the judges.

It’s a lot of names, most you’ve probably never heard of before. So now what? How to avoid being a low information voter? I use several resources. The list below is from the Chicago League of Women Voters:

The Chicago Sun-Times has a link to the eVoter page, which has a wealth of candidate information.

The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board has a list of candidate responses to questionnaires as well as video interviews:

Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice links to the VoteForJudges site. I know the long list judges are a pain to vote for, but it’s really important. Oddly enough, in your lifetime, you’re more likely to find yourself in front of a judge than a Senator or President of the United States. Think about it.

I always make it a point to check the Windy City Times for their endorsements for candidates and for judges.

But Billy, you might be saying, you dig chicks. Why are you looking at the recommendations from the Windy City Times? My friends, you don’t have to be gay to be a good gay voter. Just like you didn’t have to be black to vote for strong civil rights issues in the 60s. Trust the gays. They know what they’re doing.

So by collecting all of this information ranging from both conservative (Chicago Tribune) and liberal (Windy City Times) fronts, I feel pretty good about knowing the whole story.

Take your sample ballot that you just downloaded and begin filling it in using the information you now have in front of you. Then come Tuesday, voting will be quick and easy. You can bring your sample ballot or any other notes you have into the election booth. The only thing you can’t bring into the election booth is any kind of campaign literature that might be construed as you trying to influence other voters.

Now get out there and be a high-information voter!!!

“Confess” by Jillian Ann from Billy Sheahan on Vimeo.

I thought I’d take a little break today from opening my Christmas cards (Yes, I’m that far behind schedule!), and write a little about the music video we released yesterday.

A month ago to the day, our cast and crew assembled in Chicago to begin the adventure that would become Jillian Ann’s “Confess” music video you see here. As I mentioned in the last blog post, it was an ambitious project to complete in a month, let alone with the holidays smack dab in the middle of it all.

It took the generous talent and skills of many people who are all listed in the credits. We all were facing other holiday deadlines and there was only time for a few brief telephone conversations prior to the shoot which served as our pre-production meetings. It would all have to come together at the last minute, as is so often the case.

Jillian Ann and Rachael Weathers, our two principles, arrived in Chicago on December 17th while I continued to navigate the shoot schedule which was still missing several locations for our mental storyboard.

It wasn’t until the day before the shoot that everyone sat down together at our wardrobe meeting that we made a list of locations and a shot list for our story. I still had one camera test to do, but taking the time to write everything out is always time well spent before production commences.

We went through the lyrics and brainstormed over ideas that might work. Jillian’s manager, Jean Renard, gave us a homework assignment to look at a list of other music videos that had examples of artist performances he really thought would work well with Jillian’s song and we added that to our mix. He would be using the video to attract interest at an upcoming European music conference in Paris in January, and we all wanted to create something that would stand out and really showcase Jillian’s presence.

“Confess” was a little bit of a musical reinvention for Jillian. Bruce Somers of KidneyThieves and Nine Inch Nails fame was producing the track back in LA as we worked in Chicago, and pushed Jillian to really sing out on it. It was aggressive and passionate instead of graceful and lilting as in some of Jillian’s previous work. The video had to match that energy.

Jillian is a classically trained pianist and works out her music ideas on a piano. She wanted to incorporate a grand piano in the video and with less than 24 hours to go before the first shot, we had not secured a location with a grand piano yet. Her network of artists is vast, however, and a few phone calls later we were speaking with Max Glascott of Catalyst Chicago, an underground Chicago artist community. Yes, they had a grand piano and yes, we could shoot there the next day. We headed off to check out the space.

It turned out to be perfect and full of interesting rooms to shoot in. Max and everyone at Catalyst were extremely generous and helpful and pretty much gave us the run of the place for half a day. It was the missing piece we were hoping we would find at the last minute and all the planets aligned.

A tremendous hair and makeup artist, Chelsy Usher, has a large beautiful apartment in the Humbolt Park neighborhood of Chicago and after our trip to Catalyst, we stopped by her place to see if we could shoot some of the scenes there.

Her place was a literal treasure trove of beautifully decorated rooms and spaces. Just what you would expect a stylist’s home to look like. We checked more scene locations off our list.

When planning a shoot, especially one of this enormity in the two shooting days we had, locations are complicated and I had to continually remind the group that although there were a few scenes left on our list we had not completely figured the locations out for, it would be good to keep it to three.

“When the production is moving, we’re not shooting,” was my mantra.

Moving a production from location to location takes hours, especially in Chicago winter traffic. We would make due with two locations outside the studio. The remaining scenes would be shot at my studio in the West Loop as the third location. Perfect.

The only thing left before our first day of shooting was finishing a camera test. To answer the technical people out there who have been asking, yes, we used my Canon 5D Mark II, a beautiful camera that has positively changed the way I approach shooting motion.

It still has a few technical quirks until the good folks at Canon catch up to the rest of the HD video production world and release their next firmware update to the masses that have embraced this new camera in ways Canon never dreamed. One of those quirks is that it only shoots at 30 frames per second. Not the film standard of 24fps or 25 fps as my European colleagues are screaming for.

No matter. We work with what we have and I decided to try something I believed would work in theory, but never actually tried on my own. We would speed playback of the music track up by 125% on set for Jillian to sing to. Then in post, we would slow the footage back down to 24fps (or 23.98fps to be exact) and marry that with the track at the proper speed and everything would sync up in the edit.

In the middle of the night before the first day of shooting, as we were finishing up the shot list, I shot one take of Jillian, sitting at my kitchen counter, singing to the sped up track, but pitched down with Final Cut Pro software so it was in the same key- just playing back 25% faster than usual.

I took the shot into Final Cut, slowed it down to 23.98fps… and voila! Perfect. And it had a slight slo-motion quality to it that I knew would work brilliantly in edit.

We used my Mac laptop on set through amplified speakers playing back the 125% sped up track with a large timecode window burn to use as our smart slate to sync everything up later in post. It couldn’t have worked any better.

First stop on Saturday December 18th was to Catalyst where we shot an incredible amount of footage in six hours. Lots of space to play. And that wonderful piano you see in the video.

I have a very minimalist approach to lighting my photography and that carried over for this video shoot. I like to shoot with as few light sources as possible. Our one natural light source on Earth is the sun, and I think it’s been doing a pretty good job for all these years. So when I light an interior, I start with one large soft light and go from there.

Since we had an extremely small crew for the weekend before Christmas with everyone traveling, doing last minute shopping or otherwise engaged, I kept the lighting to a minimum. One large flourecent daylight lightbox, bounced where needed, but otherwise, that was it. I color balanced the camera to give it cool tones where necessary and warm in other places. That combined with the fabulous color correction in post by Kelly Armstrong of ColorPlayground gave the video the look we were after.

After Catalyst, we returned to my West Loop studio to shoot the bedroom scenes until the wee hours. We downloaded the shots from the day to a series of backup drives and headed to bed for a few hours to rest up for day two of shooting.

Sunday December 19th morning arrived with news that Chelsy, our hair and makeup artist, had the flu and a fever. But she would have no part of the idea taking a day off and she motored through another extremely long day, finally passing out as we shot the last scenes at her place at 2am early Monday morning. I’m still not sure how she managed to perform the three hour hair and makeup changes every time we changed scenes. She was a hero that day.

As the we were finishing the last shots at Chelsy’s place, my assistant director Katrina and I were trying to figure one still troublesome shot on the list, which was originally supposed to be Jillian walking down a deserted street in the Warehouse District in the West Loop near my studio.

I knew taking a small crew into the cold winter night to a deserted outdoor location with expensive equipment and no security could be asking for trouble. And besides that, we had shot for two 20 hours days and we were all exhausted.

It was then we looked out onto Chelsy’s large front porch on the third floor. It was about 20 feet in length. While Jillian and Rachael were in makeup for one of the last scenes, Katrina and I moved our big light to shine through one of Chelsy’s windows onto the porch. We did a quick camera test. Not exactly a deserted street, but if I kept the background out of focus, we did have night streetlights in the distance. It just might work.

And it did. I had Jillian walk the length of the 20 foot porch and ran through the song a few times. It gave us one more location without moving the tired production to a potentially unsafe location.

The last shot on the list was the shower. It decided that would be the last shot of the shoot since doing anything else with hair and makeup after that would be next to impossible.

I will admit that I was thinking of scrapping that scene and wrapping the shoot early. Well by early, I mean 2am. I know, I know… “Killing the shower scene??!! The one with two naked women making out with each other??!! Are you crazy??!!”

Well, not crazy, just tired. And I wasn’t sure yet where it would fit in the story. But Jillian was insistant and talked me down and we all crammed into Chelsy’s shower, keeping all the electrical at a safe distance and ran through the song one and a half times.

So with two dripping wet lovely women in front of me, I called it a wrap. We loaded all the equipment, wardrobe and personnel and headed out into the morning hours back to the studio.

JIllian and Rachael headed to the airport later that day and I began logging and organizing all the beautiful footage for the edit.

Post production is always a great part of the process. Since I was also editing what I shot, I always have to be very careful to extract myself from the production while looking at footage. It doesn’t matter how difficult it was to achieve a shot or how much we all loved it on set. The editor has to be fresh eyes. Is it on the screen? That’s the only thing that matters.

Over the course of the next few weeks, the edit went through many incarnations. Focus more on story? Should it be linear? It eventually evolved to a marriage of Jillian’s excellent performance moments and key beauty moments from the story b-roll footage.

I threw out two scenes entirely that although I loved during the shoot, didn’t quite work as well in the edit. Hard choices have to be made when you have three hours of footage for a five minute video.

Jillian’s manager Jean turned out to be the fresh eyes we needed, watching the rough cuts I would post for him to review in LA, pushing the edit in a direction that felt like the best of all worlds. Jillian continued to go through the footage, also in LA, sending me notes on her favorite moments.

In the middle of it all, the long days finally caught up with me and I ended up sick in bed for several days during the edit, which pushed a few of my self imposed deadlines back in my edit timeline. But the time off served to help me get some distance from the production and I think in the end it really helped.

In the meantime, I was working with Kelly Armstrong as she began to create looks for color and tone based on the rough cuts she was also receiving along the way. We spent many long nights on the phone sending versions back and forth online since she too had a drive with the high resolution footage on it at her location, drinking a glass of wine and enjoying watching the look come together. One of my favorite parts of the process.

When everyone was finally satisfied with the edit, we locked it and let Kelly have a couple of days to finish her corrections in Color. She sent the final color grades to me and now it was all up to my computers to render the large files for the final assembly back in Final Cut Pro.

And there it is. A tremendous collaboration by an amazing group of humans, all coming together with a tight schedule to create something we’re all very happy with.

Now we send it out into the world.

Well THAT sucked. That last week I mean, although some of 2009 was a cruel mistress as well. It’s nice to finally be sitting up again after a week of coughing, vivid fever dreams (starring Robert De Niro of all people) and not really being sure what day it was. I’m pretty sure it’s 2010 now.

A frantic search for more cold medicine a few days ago resulted in me finding a forgotten bottle of Nyquil from sometime around the Reagan Administration era. It was the only thing between me and blowing out a lung or worse with this cough. But now I’m pretty sure I have abs of steel for the pain of it all.

What have we learned? My contempt for December deadlines is perfectly justified. I must remember to sneak off to some quiet island next year for the entire month. Really, I’m going to do it next year.

I’m far from fully recovered as I write this, but if I don’t begin to finish up the overdue 2009 projects (I really thought I would be done with the December deadlines by now), it’ll be a rough start to 2010 and I’m going to avoid that at all costs.

As I continue to try to get back on schedule with Jillian Ann’s soon to be fabulous music video edit (pictured here), I’m going to make a few notes. Not resolutions, mind you, just notes.

Ahem.

1) Multitasking is completely overrated and I’m going to leave it in the dust bin of 2009. No one gets anything done well when multitasking.

To that end I’m offering a suggestion to everyone out there tired of doing too many things at once – badly.

UNI-TASKING FOR 2010!

Think about it. It’s brilliant. Just because we can do a million things at once, doesn’t mean we should.

Let’s practice once, shall we?

“Yes, I’d love to be a part of that project. My schedule opens up on Thursday and I can begin working on it then.”

(Insert the usual, but we need it tomorrow statement, here)

“Wow, that’s a pretty serious deadline. But as I just mentioned, I’m working on another project until Thursday and I’d be happy to get started on it then.”

(Now a more frantic BUT WE NEED IT TOMORROW, here)

“I hear what you’re saying, but you have to understand that the project I’m currently working on is just as important to someone else, and you wouldn’t want me to abandon your project mid-stream for someone else’s emergency, would you? I mean, you would want me to focus all of my energy on your project, right?”

(Something between sobbing and threats, here)

“Yes, there, there now. I know how important it is. And that’s exactly why I’m going to tell you I can’t get started on it today because if I do, my current project will not get completed at the quality level I promised, and your project will get only half of my attention and won’t do anyone any good either. So, see if you can get your deadline pushed back until after Thursday and then I’ll be happy to help out.”

Oh sure, they won’t go away happy, but really. Is it fair to jeopardize one project already in progress for an emergency project? Aren’t we just rewarding bad planning if we continue to try to squeeze one more in… just this once?

So. Uni-tasking. It’s an idea worth considering.

2) My social calendar is like trying to get tickets for the last season of Oprah.

Seriously. It’s like five months now from the time someone asks me to go out for coffee, lunch or cocktails with them and when I actually carve out some time to actually see them.

It started last Memorial Day when I took on an emergency project over the three day holiday weekend and it didn’t let up until… well… it’s actually still going. I kept promising people I could see them next month… and then the month after that… and then the month after… well, you get the idea.

That must end in 2010. It’s just not healthy. It’s all about the balance that I try so hard to achieve in my life and so often come up short. It’s going to mean saying no more often to projects and favors, business or otherwise, even the emergency ones.

Will it frustrate people? Most certainly. Will I make less money in 2010 than I did in 2009? Maybe. But not necessarily. It really depends on how I choose the projects that I do take on.

Will I be healthier for it? But, of course!

All I know is that as everyone was ringing in the New Year, I was trying to help Robert De Niro push a car up a wall in a parking garage…. in my vivid fever dream.

Am I going to make a few modifications in 2010? To quote my car pushing buddy, “A lil’ bit.”

December is always a challenging month for me. Not because of the usual shopping stresses, but more because of work related holiday deadlines. It seems like my already bursting plate seems to overflow even more leading up to the holidays. I’ve learned over the years to not stress too much about it. There are things I can’t control and things I can. I tend to focus more on the latter.

I pick only a handful of holiday parties to attend between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some are client related and necessary, but I know it’s not possible to be at them all, so I don’t try to pack them all in. And I pick a few to spend time with good friends. It’s all about finding the balance.

In the advertising world, there seems to be a general crush to get last minute projects completed and my colleagues and I spend lots of late nights accomplishing them the best we can. We try to spread out the workload so people can get out to see their families and no one gets too weeded out.

There are always last minute photography print orders that need to be filled, but I try to keep expectations realistic, telling potential buyers that they’ll need to allow a little extra time for me to make them before the holidays. It’s worked out fairly well the last few years. Everyone managed to get their prints on time this year.

By the time December 25th gets here, most of us have come down with some sickness due to getting a little too run down. It’s a bit like the cycle of life. Once you know it’s going to be like this and plan for it, it’s a little more manageable.

This year, I did however to take on one massive additional project that there was really no time for. It’s one of those things that I weigh the pros and cons before I accept it.

On December 4th, my good friend Jillian Ann asked if there was any way I could direct and edit a new music video for her new single, “I Confess”. I always enjoy collaborating with her and the results are usually very rewarding. The only problem was the deadline. The entire project would have to be completed by January 10th so it could be presented at a major European music convention in Paris that month.

Now, a little over a month sounds like plenty of time to complete a project like this, but it’s really not that much time. Trying to accomplish it during my own December deadline crush was extremely ambitious and I told her so.

We would definitely have to shoot before Christmas so I would have time to edit, complete color correction and final finish and make her deadline. That meant mounting the huge production in two weeks and shooting the weekend before Christmas.

The first task was reserving plane tickets for everyone flying into Chicago for the shoot as soon as possible since plane travel becomes more difficult as the holidays approach. We would use a local crew, but the principles would all be flying in.

The wheels were in motion. No turning back now.

We all began exchanging emails and brief phone calls when we had a moment to try to get an accurate picture of our wish list of what the video music would look like. In the meantime, Jillian continued to work on the still unfinished music track in LA. We knew there was a good chance the track would not be fully completed before the shoot, but I told her as long as we had a rough vocal track to work with at the shoot, her producer in LA could continue working on the track even after the shoot.

In the meantime, I began planning the shoot locations and finding a crew, which turned out to be very challenging with holiday schedules. We would have to find a compromise of what we wished for and what we could actually reasonably accomplish.

As the shoot approached, my December continued to be as busy as usual and I knew I would not be able to do as much pre-planning as I usually like to do on these productions, so rather than throw out a blanket call for crew help, I decided to reach out to a small group of people I had worked with before and trusted so we wouldn’t have to get up to speed with each other. Communication would have to be more intuitive than anything else. I knew that would lessen the amount of people that would be available, but I wanted to try to limit the amount of unknowns.

It turned out to be a really great decision.

We continued to pair down the wish list. The principles would be Jillian and one other model, Rachael Weathers, even though we had initially discussed having more. The number of potential locations was reduced, since I now only had two full shooting days instead of three because of my full schedule.

An amazing local makeup and hair stylist called Chelsy Usher, who had worked with Jillian for many years, would take on the challenge of a dozen hair, makeup and wardrobe set-ups over the course of the shoot. Jillian called in a few favors in LA to get us an amazing wardrobe, which when added to several good pieces I had on hand, resulted in racks of clothing to have for the shoot.

On Thursday December 17th, Jillian and Rachael flew into Chicago while I continued to finish up a few advertising projects. I spent Friday running back and forth from my studio to my downtown Chicago office to tie up some loose ends and begin wardrobe meetings and location scouting.

We still were missing one item on the wish list and that was to find a location with a grand piano. Jillian reached out to her network and we found a group of artists at Catalyst Chicago who agreed to help with their beautiful space. The last missing piece was now in place, less than 24 hours before we would begin shooting.

I raced back downtown to one of my must attend holiday parties for a few hours and returned to the studio to begin camera tests and finalize the location and shoot schedule.

We would be shooting the video using my Canon 5D Mark II, a camera that has been a game changer in how I shoot motion. It shoot beautiful images, but only at 30fps (frames per second) and we wanted to edit in the much more universally standard 24fps. My solution was to speed the playback music track up by 125% on set and have Jillian sing a little faster than usual. When we slowed it down to 24fps, everything would be at the right speed…. in theory.

A little before midnight on Friday night we shot a brief run though of the sped up song and I did the footage conversion and locked it to the rough music track and did a very quick edit. Perfect. And we had the added bonus of the track being at the correct speed, but Jillian’s movements were slowed down slightly, which added to the look we were hoping for. Everything looks better in slow motion any way.

By this time, it was 4am Saturday morning. Crew and hair and makeup call were in four hours at 8am. But we were finally ready. Katrina Nelken arrived on set as my assistant director. I’ve worked with her on a few projects in the past and her skills and great ideas throughout the shoot really made all the difference.

We shot for two extraordinarily long days, finally wrapping at 5am Monday morning so I could get back to finishing up my advertising projects a few hours later. Jillian and Rachael flew out of Chicago and the next part of the process could begin.

We began the process of converting the footage, loading it into Final Cut Pro and organizing it for the edit to begin on Christmas Eve, but not before I drove out to my parents house to see my family on the 24th for the afternoon. That balance thing again.

Back in Chicago at my studio by 6pm, I began making the first edits, roughing out the master shots and posting it as the clock struck midnight on Christmas morning for Jillian and the crew to see the beginnings of all our hard work.

It was only then that I could see all the pieces at once and how amazing it was that we managed to pull this off. The footage is beautiful. A testament to a small group of trusted and skilled humans, coming together to create something beyond what we had hoped for even with the limited time and resources we had to pull this project off.

Here’s a snapshot of one of my edit monitors with 14 of the 66 shots displayed for me to work with. Since it’s a music video and all the singing has to be in sync, it’s important to be able to see all the footage locked together in motion in multi-cam mode to help choose the hundreds of individual edits that will need to be made throughout the 5 minute song. It’s clearly an embarrassment of riches on this one.

I spent Christmas Day roughing out the storyline with all the footage in the edit and continued to make a list of the moments that I want to make sure make it into the final cut. There are a lot. It’s going to be a challenge, but a fun one.

About 5pm on Christmas Day, I decided to take a break and revisit one of my quirky Christmas Day traditions: Visiting my local 7-Eleven, a couple of blocks from my studio.

Now that may seem like a strange holiday tradition, so let me explain. When you work the crazy hours I do over the course of the year, my 7-Eleven is a bit of an oasis when it’s 3am and I realize I haven’t eaten all day. I know all of the clerks there and I always spend a few minutes there talking with them seeing how their long shifts are going.

I think it’s something I picked up in Paris where a visit to any local merchant isn’t complete without a little conversation. It’s just good manners.

Last night was no different. The young man behind the counter was a familiar face. He usually works all the holidays and I make it a point to stop by and spend a few minutes to catch up with him, since we were both working on Christmas.

I told him about Jillian’s video and showed him a few scenes on my iPhone and we began talking about music and art. He’s pursing a music career himself as a singer and violinist. Something no one would know unless they bothered to ask the guy behind the counter selling them cigarettes and lottery games.

Before I knew it, he was playing me some vocals he had recorded on his iPhone. We talked about the differences in musical phrasing between American music and Indian music. He has a beautiful sweet voice. Full of passion. It was a little Christmas gift to get to hear him that night.

In the crush of busy deadlines, it’s really important to slow down and just listen to what is around you. Finding the balance.

Merry Christmas.

“I’m not sure if I got it. Maybe we should try one more.”

The look on my model’s face said otherwise. She wasn’t a smoker, just pretending to be one for the shoot.

The great thing about shooting digitally is you can see what you have instantly. The bad thing about shooting digitally is that if I’m constantly playing back pictures in the viewfinder, I find I become detached from my subject and the shoot. It’s called “chimping,” and I’ve taught myself to return to the days of shooting film when you really didn’t know if you had it until you processed the film.

You had to trust your instincts.

“Yeah, I got it.”

So we moved on, hoping the unpredictable perfect swirl of smoke had been captured. It’s freeing to just go with your gut.

Shooting film taught me to know when I had it, or at least be pretty sure. It forces you to really be in the moment and I find most shoots go better without the constant interruption of chimping.

Photography is like a dance, if you have to look at your feet, you’re not really dancing.

Thanks to everyone who made my 2009 a really great year!

You can see more new photographs of Asphyxia in the The Gallery of the Month Portfolio, at billysheahan.com and on the Billy Sheahan Photography iPhone App (link will open iTunes).

Postcard subscriptions through the mail are $25 for 12 months. Details here.

Thanks for your continued support.

Billy

In the mid 1940s, Paris, France was struggling to regain it’s footing as the fashion capital of the world. Materials and fabric shortages, not to mention food shortages, conspired to drive Parisien designers to near extinction. In 1945, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue hired Richard Avedon to photograph the Paris Collections in the way it was remembered before the war.

His glamourous photographs helped rejuvenate the spirit of Paris and became the standard for fashion photography for years to come. I recently was fortunate enough to see some of those original prints in New York over the summer. They remain stunning to this day.

I have many influences in my photography, and Avedon is at the top of the list. I used his books as my classroom when I began shooting fashion. So when I had the chance to shoot with the lovely Amiria Divine this fall, we created something inspired by those 50 year old photographs.

Classic fashion photography continues to inspire my work, aujourd’hui et toujours.

You can see new still images of Amiria Divine in the The Gallery of the Month Portfolio, at billysheahan.com

Postcard subscriptions through the mail are $25 for 12 months. Details here.

Thanks for your continued support.

Billy

My Billy Sheahan Photography iPhone app (link opens iTunes), has been out for a little over a week now. It’s done phenomenally well. Beyond my wildest expectations. A little over 1000 installs every day. Really tremendous.

And besides all the installs, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I felt I needed an iPhone app and many more about how I promoted it to get so many people interested in downloading it. All good questions.

First the why. There are a lot of photographers out there. And a lot of people who have cameras who fancy themselves photographers. It’s a very competitive business. Over the years I’ve sent out monthly postcards with a new photograph to clients and fans to keep my name and images in front of them on a regular basis. When the postage and printing of hundreds of mailings a month became too expensive from a business standpoint, I pared the mailing list down to a few dozen clients I wanted to stay in contact with and offered everyone else and fans the choice of a free email postcard, or switch to a subscription of $25 a year for 12 postcards.

And that’s worked great. The surprise benefit of switching to email is that it was easy to track who was looking and who wasn’t as well as giving people the ability to click reply and send me instant feedback. Always nice to hear what people think.

But email is becoming something people really only have time to glance at. Our email boxes are filled with so many things that’s it’s so easy to get lost in the clutter. It’s becoming difficult to communicate with email.

Then there were the social networking sites. Friendster (for those who remember that one), MySpace (becoming less and less useful), Facebook (everyone is on Facebook), Tumblr, and finally, my favorite of them all, Twitter because sometimes I don’t have time to write an entire blog entry, but I want to keep my name on people’s minds. Also Twitter is actually a great resource for information. Really.

SoloModels and ModelMayhem are two additional sites I’m on. And I even have a listing on TED.

But these are things any and most photographers can do. So how to come up with another new way to differentiate myself?

I began working with SoloModels this year on an iPhone app they offer. I had explored the idea of downloading the Apple iPhone Software Developers Kit and learning how to code an iPhone app on my own, but the SoloModels version offered what I was looking to do without all the heavy learning on my part. They had totally figured it out so I didn’t have to.

And there were a couple of things I liked about the SoloModels iPhone app. They had done it already and it worked. And even better, updating my photography, video and other content was easy since the iPhone app uses my SoloModels account to feed the app. I make a change on my SoloModels account and boom, my iPhone app is updated as well. My app always stays live. Couldn’t be easier.

So then, how to promote it? I’ve worked in advertising for about 20 years now. I’ve seen how successful campaigns have been created and I’ve also seen how bad ones don’t succeed. I decided to use that knowledge on promoting my own app.

I’ve edited hundreds of television commercials over the years. And I know that it’s not just about getting the message across. You have to make a spot something people want to watch. Your message is usually plunked down in the middle of something entertaining people are watching. The commercial is an interruption. Something people would rather skip, unless it’s interesting or compelling in some way.

So I knew any commercial I created for it had to be fun. To the point.

And I decided to treat it like a movie campaign. Before the app was even finished, I had the developer at SoloModels record video of him running the app through it’s paces on his computer desktop, since it didn’t physically exist on an iPhone yet. Basically a video screen capture.

I took that video and imported it into Final Cut Studio, cut out the developer’s desktop background so all you could see was the iPhone and flew it around on a white background, showcasing what it would do once it was available to download. The editing process took about 20 hours.

Then I created two versions, a “Coming This November” version to run while it when through the Apple iTunes Store approval process, which usually takes a few weeks. The second version was the “It’s Here” version.

I posted the “Coming This November” version everywhere I could think of: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, MySpace, and Tumblr as well as my blog and Twitter. It ran for two weeks and generated a bit of buzz for the app. Just like a Coming Soon trailer for a movie, the idea was to get people aware of it before it was available.

When I got the email that the iPhone app had been approved and was on the Apple iTunes Store, I immediately took down all the “Coming This November” versions of the commercial and uploaded the “It’s Here” version to the same places.

Over the course of the three weeks of the Coming this November and It’s Here campaign, I monitored Google and found it had been picked up on a lot of iPhone app and photography websites. By putting it up in so many places and keywording the postings with “iPhone app” and “photography,” it was easy for people who’s job it is to find new iPhone apps to find it. It even got picked up by a Japanese language iPhone app site. In fact about 30% of the installs are from Japan, a market that I had been virtually unknown in previously.

But what does it cost? Photographers, the good ones anyway, spend thousands of dollars a year creating promotional pieces and marketing their work. Just like any other business, you have to surround yourself with good people and create a polished, well designed campaign for yourself. It’s what separates the pro photographers from the GWCs (Guys with Cameras). The SoloModels iPhone app will run you about $1000 to get up and running. Is it worth it? Well, each photographer will have to make that assessment for themselves.

For me, it was a no-brainer because it’s a new way to get my Billy Sheahan Photography Brand literally into the hands of thousands of people who I wouldn’t have access to. Will it generate any future work for me? Too early to tell. But the feedback from my current clients so far has been very good. They show the app around to their network circles and more and more people learn about my photography.

I also decided to make my iPhone app a free download. I could have charged a buck or two for it, but the idea was not to make money from the app, but to get it into as many hands as possible. Rather than make a few dollars on the app, I’m hoping to make even more from actual photography work and build my client base.

We’re already working on version 2.0 of Billy Sheahan Photography that will have more goodies.

I spend about 70% of my time on the business of photography and 30% of it actually photographing and retouching and what not. Behind every beautiful image is hours and hours of paperwork, research, marketing and meeting new clients before I even pick up my camera. It’s a business.

Someday everyone and their mom will have an iPhone app, or a Droid app, or whatever the next thing is that we don’t know about yet. But for now, my iPhone app seems to be ahead of the curve, generating nice buzz. It’s just another piece of my photography marketing pie.

FADE IN: Billy sitting alone at a table at a cafe in New Orleans under a single light, that even though it’s noon, illuminates only him. A cigarette dangles from his mouth, channeling William Shatner… or is it Stewie?

“She packed my bags… last night… pre-flight….

as a kite… by then….”

That is, unless Tropical Storm Ida has other plans for me.

It’s been a great trip back to New Orleans again for the Octavia Art Gallery show last Saturday night. Although I’ve spent much more time working than playing this visit.

I brought a portable drive with work that seems to follow me around these days. But, if I have to be working, New Orleans is a lovely change of venue. Here’s another photo from the opening, featuring the lovely Trixie Minx.

The opening at Octavia Art Gallery in New Orleans was tremendous and amazing. I really love it here. I met more incredible artists and people who came by to check out all the great photography at the Exotica Exhibition. The gallery manager Emily was so kind in the way she welcomed me and made me feel right at home in their lovely space. The gallery had been painted a rich deep red for the evening and it made all the artwork really stand out in a beautiful way.

Besides the art, the talented and lovely Trixie Minx performed two of her burlesque routines throughout the evening, adding another layer of fabulousness to the night.

I always enjoy my time here in The Big Easy and I always feel inspired while being here. The weather is warm, sunny and pleasant and there’s nothing better than talking long walks through the Garden District. And I got my streetcar pass for those longer excursions when I’m traveling uptown or to the Quarter.

I made the mistake again of mentioning to one of the gallery patrons last night that my hotel was “east” of here, and was promptly reminded in that most friendly New Orleans way, that there is no north, south, east or west in New Orleans. It’s all Uptown, Downtown, the Quarter, etc.. Ah, yes. Now I remember!

Turnout to the opening was really great. Octavia has a great following and there were all kinds of people coming by throughout the evening to view the artwork.

I had great long conversations with so many people about New Orleans, art and life in general. Always a great time to connect with some of the most warm and welcoming people on the planet.

In other news, I am completely astounded by the response to my new Billy Sheahan Photography iPhone app that came out late Thursday evening. As I write this, we’re approaching 2000 installs worldwide. And it appears that I can now use the phrase, “I’m huge in Japan!” The Japanese are responsible for nearly half of the downloads. I guess they love the photography of this particular round-eye.

So it’s been a great week. Incredibly busy. In fact I’m doing a lot of color correcting and retouching of photoshoots from the past couple of weeks while in New Orleans. But I can’t complain. My office these days is a beautiful courtyard at my hotel under the warm sunny sky.

Life really couldn’t be any more lovely at the moment. I’m feeling very fortunate and grateful.