On Monday I spent my day photographing furniture on location at the Boston Design Center for John Herbert. John has me come down pretty regularly now to take some photographs of his most recent work. I travel to his workshop rather than having him transport his large, shiny, very expensive and labor intensive pieces of furniture to a studio.

Location shooting can be very difficult depending on where you end up but bringing a studio to a location like the design center is usually much easier than most.

1. The guys at the Boston Furniture Collaborative are kind enough to keep a roll of 12′ seamless hung in the 20′ wide hallway for me most of the time
2. When you flip the light switch all of the lights go out
3. I have more than 150′ to back up and finally,
4. There are ample wall sockets to plug into with easy breaker (and restroom) access.

The list may seem strange to some but, combined with a hard working assistant, these things make life a vacation for a photographer. There is one window to worry about when you have to burn in ambient light, like I did for this piece:

…but it never gets direct light and it comes from a narrow spot in the hall that can easily be blocked.

Even with all of these great advantages to the location, it is still not a studio and requires a bit more post production than I would like.

Here is the original. (I have already done the basic LR adjustments)

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Once a year Mass art invites NESOP over to photograph there fashion students collections. It is pretty much a free for all on location most of the day. This year I got to go and I was looking forward to getting a few location shots to add to my portfolio. I wound up in this window all day and as a result will only be able to add one photo to my portfolio. There just isn’t enough variety otherwise.

That said, I figured I would post the rest here. The outfits were pretty impressive and the lighting was quite nice. As is is usually the case with NESOP photo shoots I got paired up for the day with Ariel.

Working with Ariel for the day was a lot of fun. For those of you that don’t know, Ariel is Aydon’s mom.

We had a great time putting the photographs together and the results are pretty good. Being a Boston photographer makes fashion photography pretty hard to get into but NYC might be in our future.

    After spending ten weeks with a few of Boston’s furniture makers my project has finally come together. I am in the process of putting together  a video presentation of the images and decided to post some of the detail shots in the interim. The overall story behind the images is that of two local woodworking shops. The spaces are shared by multiple craftsmen and are located in the Boston Design Center.

    The images that I have chosen to show are of the overall space and really depict the character of the atmosphere. On days when the lighting was not so hot in the Design Center, I did my best to mimic the usually incredible window light in the building.