Ryan Feinstein (DJ Ryfy) and Valentina Lan Craig were cool enough to help me practice my newfound passion. I had purchased the Nikon D90 a month prior to these images and I had no other agenda than to practice, find color and light and to stretch the legs and capabilities of the DSLR.
As for the title of this set...
At the time, Ryan and Valentina,“Val,” were dating, and some of the images showed their intimacy and “love.” And being a DJ and a singer, respectively, Ry and Val’s lives are full of “music.” Pretty straightforward. When I compiled all the images, I burned CDs for them. Val would eventually post the images to Facebook within an album entitled, “Love and Music.” I liked it, and copied it. We joked a few times during the shoot,“these look like images for the hip-hop album you guys are putting out.”
I was excited to see what the D90 could do at night, with low light, and this set began at 9:45pm. The setting was a school believe it or not: The Academy of Information Technology & Engineering (AITE) in Stamford, CT. It turned out to be a playground of different light sources. We stayed close to the main entrance and found a few other interesting possibilities just by wandering around.
I was impressed at how the D90 could render different light temperatures within the same image (something I had seen a lot in Joe McNally’s work before shooting my own images). In particular, the image of Val holding onto the fence, there is a household fluorescent lamp being held off camera-right giving that green/blue hue, and the light behind her in the upper left, giving that yellow hue is a light above a door that is one of the entrances to the school. Tasty.
Here are some fun outtake images. We were all so focused on getting very cool, “bad-ass” images that it was inevitable to get a few laughs in between. Ryan is also a great actor, performer and comedian so it was only natural that he would ham it up a few times. The final image contains our gracious lighting assistant for the evening, Jim Ringel.
