This was my first time shooting with Hakim, an illustrator and painter from Columbus. When he showed up at me studio I thought it’d be helpful for us to sit down and chat for a bit in an effort to get to know each other and get more comfortable. We discussed our favorite comedians (Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, etc). We swapped stories of struggles and breakthroughs as independent artists and freelancers in a smaller market. We made the world a bit smaller as we compared who we knew and had collaborated with.

Going in to the shoot I knew that I wanted to experiment with multiple shadows. One of my biggest lighting inspirations is Sølve Sundsbø. Years back he made a portrait of actor Michiel Huisman that appeared to be an homage to the Man Ray portrait of Lee Miller. The image ultimately inspired me to combine color theory with the multiple light sources to come up with this image. This time I decided to use four lights, keeping three of them un-gelled and gelling one of them blue, to match Hakim’s hair.

We shot some images for my One Man’s Trash… series, while incorporating the blue.

I also used the blue-gelled light while shooting with the prism film. After shooting a few frames at a “normal” shutter speed, I decided to slow down my shutter to 1/5 and implement some motion to the images. After all, every shape in the shot (aside from Hakim) is just a reflection of the room, which is lit with ambient light. This means that I can use shutter drag to blur everything except Hakim, who is frozen in place by the strobe.