Sunday, March 9, 2008

Heuman Pregnancy Shoot









I had the pleasure of photographing Josh and Aubrey Heuman and their beautiful son Landon about a year ago when Landon was only a few months old. All children are beautiful, but Landon was especially gorgeous with his huge blue eyes, incredibly sweet disposition and obvious joy that he inspired within his parents. Now, Aubrey is pregnant again and they asked me to photograph them together and with Landon and to also photograph Landon solo. When talking with them about the shoot, I also found out that Landon's handsome face hadn't gone unnoticed. He had signed with Ford Modeling and had shot his first layout for a Babies R' Us catalog. It will be out in April, Josh said. He is an absolute joyful child and I think I spent nearly as much time holding him (he liked me, apparently) as I did photographing him. This is one of the absolute joys of my job: Giving people heirlooms of their lives and loves and meeting the kind of people like the Heumans who treasure their lives, their loves, their children and want to document that love for infinity.

John Travolta and Kelly Preston

The couple were in St Petersburg March 4, 2008 to promote the Sunscreen Film Festival and delighted the hundred or so people who had passes to get into the private meet and greet.
I've photographed a number of celebritites in the past five years but Travolta was going to be about the biggest. There's no doubt about his star power nor about his abilities to command a screen and a character.
I had a little anxiety while awaiting their arrival. I tested my flashes, my camera settings and set up a few umbrellas in the corner of the room. I had asked his handlers if I may get a few minutes to shoot him with umbrella lights that give a soft, portrait-appropriate light to your subjects. They said they would make that happen since I was on assignment for Getty Images. They know the company and said that they appreciated the work that Getty puts out. "We know you're not paparazzi," they said. We respect the work of the company, they added, and agreed to provide Travolta and Preston to my corner before the night was over.
I was told the couple would leave about 9pm and about ten minutes before I noticed security moving guests to the side to provide an escape route for them to get out the doors. I figured I was probably not going to get my few minutes with them and it didn't suprise me. Sometimes, you get promised everything and receive nothing.
This was not the case tonight.
When Travolta got closer to the exit (where my "studio" was set up), I started to tense up a tad. Would he hit the door, or would he hit my studio?
I motioned to him to come over to me.
He came.
I knew they wanted to leave but were being gracious for me and giving me my five minutes.
I asked them to stand in the location where I had positioned my lights. Kelly asked for a minute to touch up her makeup.
I only shot about 9 frames of the couple. At one point, I asked John to lean in a tad closer to Kelly. That's the shot you see here.
A fellow photographer who was there, Jimmy Stem, told me before the shoot that when I was done shooting, to just move over beside the couple and he'd pop a frame of me posing with them. He did. That's the other shot you see here.
Travolta and Preston were gracious, open, friendly and even told the TV media people there that they're "regular" people in the town of Ocala. "We shop at Walmart. Kelly has her nails done at Target," Travolta said. "We don't go there in the daytime, of course. We go at midnight."