Being a portrait photographer I often get to work with interesting people, just some of them happen to be more well known than others, as was the case when Inked Magazine out of NYC contacted me to photograph Tom Savini. For those of you who don't know who Tom is, he is one of the best horror special effects artists in Hollywood, and he also played Sex Machine in From Dusk till Dawn which in itself is awesome in every way (view clip here). The inspiration behind his horror work actually stems from his time as a photographer in the Vietnam war, which is what I spent the majority of the time we had together talking about. Needless to say, a guy who's lived his kind of life has some stories. As for the shoot, I wasn't given the location of where he was staying or what time he was available until 3 hours before I was supposed to start clicking the shutter, so there wasn't any time to pre-scout locations, all I knew was that I had no intention of photographing a horror movie icon in a nice hotel room, because that's just silly. I was told Tom would be good to go for 1:00pm, so I showed up to his hotel at 12:30pm to take a look around the area to see what was available. In the loading area at the back of the hotel I found a bench and a storage container, 5 minutes later I had permission to use them, and 20 minutes after that my assistant and I had 3 lights setup and we were ready to roll. I went and grabbed Tom from his room and we started shooting.
From there we switched over to a two light setup for a profile shot:
Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, sound off in the comments below.
Cheers -Nate