Everyone asks me about this image so I thought I’d write a behind the scenes post. On Saturday morning, March 17th 2012, the last day of SXSW, I got an email from NPR asking me to cover a last minute interview. An interview with Jack White. You could say I was shakin’ (I don’t think the song was out yet). I told my other clients that “something came up.” They wanted stills of Bob Boilen and Jack White talking. I took the stills while they were setting up because I couldn’t make noise during the interview.
So here I am, sitting in a room in The Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, watching Bob Boilen and Jack White hang out. It was a really relaxed interview—Bob had interviewed him before and they picked up where they left off. Check out the link above to watch the entire thing. It was inspiring to watch him talk about his creative process, but all I could think about was if he’d give me a few seconds for a portrait after the interview. Jack had been doing press all day to promote the new album, and we had the last slot. As I’m waiting I set my two SB-600 strobes to 1/8th (I think, but does it matter though?). Afterwards I asked Jack for a quick photo and he was cool with it. I had the audio guy hold one strobe on the front left, and the video guy hold the other on the back right to crosslight him. I fired off around 10 quick frames, winged the f-stop, and we were done in about 20 seconds. At the time I had the Nikon D90 and the 50mm f/1.4, and triggered the strobes with the on camera flash. NPR was pretty stoked. The photo above is slightly desaturated compared to the one NPR posted. I changed my mind after spending some time looking at it.
The experience resonated with me and I came back to SXSW this year to focus on portraits, on a much bigger scale:
http://lorenw.sg-host.com/blog/sxsw-2013-portraits/
