Photographing Art & Soul for The Creative Coalition

I’ve just wrapped up my latest project with the Sony a900 photographing over 80 celebrities for The Creative Coalition’s book “Art & Soul” which will be distributed to President Obama and Congress this May.

Assignments this good are really rare. Even though I’ve been l blessed with more than my share of unbelievable assignments in my career, shooting portraits of so many Oscar winners, Tony winners, Grammy winners and Emmy winners was about as cool gig as I can imagine.


Brian Smith Photographs "Art & Soul" for The Creative Coalition - Images by Brian Smith

Our shoot began in during Oscar Week at Haven House in Beverly Hills. Thanks to thanks to generous support from Sony and Hachette Filipacchi Media we photographed 68 celebrities over a three-day period in Los Angeles where we shot 5,370 exposures with over 200 gigs of raw images using Sony’s a900 camera. That’s a great test of the durability and quality of a camera. The a900 never missed a beat.

The lenses are quite simply the sharpest lenses I’ve ever used. I love all of Sony’s Zeiss glass, but I’m becoming particularly fond of Sony’s Zeiss 24-70/2.8. I was able to shoot very quickly on this project using that lens to shoot 90% of the images for the book. This lens is sharper than prime lenses in that range and it absolutely blows away the competition. The remaining images for the book were shot with Sony’s Zeiss 85/1.4 that I kept mounted on second a900 body.

Our crew included my wife Fazia who always makes certain everyone looked fabulous on our shoots, Kayla Lindquist, Director of Sony's Artisan's of Imagery program, produced the shoot and made certain even the smallest detail was under control, Matthew Schulert, our fabulous digital tech from Splashlight, Joel Warren and Eddie Tricomi and over a dozen hair and make-up artists from Warren-Tricomi.

When you imagine shooting in a Beverly Hills mansion, you can only envision big massive rooms. Yet our shoot was relegated to a less than opulent 9x14’ maid’s quarters. Since the biggest part of photography is problem solving, we had to find a way to make it work. I decided to make our small pace even cozier by wrapping the entire set in black. Normally, the idea of using a DSLR to shoot celebrities dressed in black against a black background is a recipe for disaster. Other DSLR tend to block up in the shadows, but one of the things I love about the a900 is that it holds unbelievable detail in the shadows, so I was confident we could pull it off.

The highlights of our shoots included Kerry Washington and Tichina Arnold fighting it out for bragging rights in a pose-off. For the record, in situations like that, it's actually the photographer who wins. Speaking of posing, celebrity stylist Philip Bloch might very well still be posing in front of the camera if they hadn't threatened to turn the power off on us.

We then headed to New York to photograph the rest of the artists in this book. Tony Bennett welcomed us into his Central Park apartment where we talked about what the arts has meant to him, which is the sort of experience that can hardly be topped - except possibly earlier that day when Anne Hathaway showed up with a box of her favorite cupcakes for our crew. Thanks Annie, for being even sweeter than I'd imagined.

In the end we shot over 9,000 images and 350 gigs of RAW data without a single slowdown or problem. During the shoots, the artists in this book and I rarely spoke of fame, fortune or fabulous performances. We spoke about their childhoods and what led them to where they are today. Regardless of whether they grew up in small towns and large cities, rich or poor, their lives were all shaped and influenced by the arts and the artists who influenced their careers.

My thanks go out to Ted Okada, Steve Sommers, Phil Lubell, Kristen Elder and Mark Weir of Sony for their support of this project, Kayla Lindquist, director of Sony Artisan’s of Imagery program, Jeffrey Roberts of American PHOTO, Al Silvestri, Alissa Reynolds and Anna Martin of Hachette Filipacchi Media, Eileen Gittins of Blurb, and special thanks to Robin Bronk and Barbara Horvath of The Creative Coalition.