The Silver Starlighters
And the importance of creating for yourself
As a guy that photographs what other people want full time, toeing the line between responsibly supporting my family and feeding my creative soul has been one of the biggest challenges of my career. So today we’ll talk about the rhythms of creative self-care while I show you behind the scenes from a recent personal project: The Silver Starlighters!
*It’s worth a disclaimer that we photographed these last Fall before the election and DOGE and the Tesla boycott. This shoot is in no way an endorsement of Elon’s politics, it’s strictly good fun
Since we’re new here, let me take you back to my beginning: the floor of my college apartment. It’s 11pm and my Apple powerbook is open to Myspace, where I’m streaming Sufjan Stevens playing banjo on a fencepost as I procrastinate my homework assignments. 14 other tabs are open, all pages of musicians with interesting profile images (and maybe a 15th for Zappos sneakers). You see, I had recently began taking Deni Chamberlain’s photojournalism course at Iowa State University and I was on my way to falling deeply, obsessively in love with the craft of photography. I learned that our library has a section of all the coffee table photo books I could never afford, and I was pouring over several I had checked out: Annie Leibovitz anthologies. David LaChapelle. Avedon’s In The American West. (to name a few favorites).
Countless photographs from this time are forever burned into my mind because they were unlike anything I had seen before and I was enamored with how they made me feel. Much like music had done for me in adolescence, these photographs were penetrating my core and become a part of my internal dialogue. Oh the lighting! The compositions! Emotions! Color schemes! Costumes! Concepts! So many layers of intentionality working together to pull a viewer away from their realities and into a story. It was a language I could understand. I wanted to gobble it up and become fluent.
Fast-forward a bit and I was a full-fledged adult needing to make a living so I started photographing things people were willing to pay for: weddings, graduation portraits, family portraits. It was a far cry from my dream of making conceptual images for Rolling Stone, but it was still a form of the dream: I got to play with camera equipment and jam with amazing humans and help them tell their stories and look their best.
After a few years I noticed a pattern of burnout within myself. My tank would fill up quickly when I would photograph something for myself, and that fuel would burn as I engrossed myself into creating the best work I could within the parameters of my client’s needs. As long as I had fuel in my tank, I could show up at my desired level. But when my tank hit E, I would start to feel resentment for my chosen grind and that would reflect in my work. So I learned to keep my eye on my tank levels and carve out time for refills when needed. At first this felt irresponsible (turning away work), but it was quintessential and eventually cultivated a rhythm that has allowed this introvert to stay the course.
The through-line of my tank-filling exercises mirrors child’s play: I photograph something that has no reason to exist other than for my own processing and enjoyment. This creates a safe space for me to try new things and embrace failure without the risk of letting down a client. In failure, I learn, hone and refine. And in success, I expand my portfolio with a deeper demonstration of my skill and vision. Throughout my career, personal work has proven to connect with my audience and reciprocate in unexpected projects down the road. But that can’t be my primary impetus or the work doesn’t land the same. The work has to exist not because I feel someone else wants it to, but because I do. It took me a long time to validate my own desire as reason enough to invest the time, but it makes all the difference.
Now, onto the Starliners! This recent personal project was a collaboration with one of my all time favorite humans, Alan Randall. Alan is a stylist by trade, and our aesthetics share the same resonant frequency. (He’s also the groom in my all time favorite wedding photos). We had been discussing about how fashion is relegated to the young and how cool it would be to apply it to under-represented demographics (i.e. older people). Conveniently, Alan’s parents, Frank and Jolene Randall, and their friend, Judy Aiken, fit that demographic and agreed to be our muses for a shoot!
Our second step was to nail down a concept. We both wanted something more cinematic and with greater production value than a standard studio shoot. Our mutual friend and genius entrepreneur Clayton of Clayton Farms Salads (the world’s freshest farm to window) became an early Cybertruck adopter and granted us permission to borrow his ride for a shoot. Bingo! Now to connect the two… Many of my favorite memories with my mom revolved around Star Trek (in all its iterations, Next Gen being my fav). The vision came quickly and we agreed on a retro space explorer theme that combined badass with a dash of kitsch and silliness.
Thirdly, we needed a location that felt otherworldly. Rocks, sand and sky. No signs of life. Living in Iowa, everything is lush green with trees and corn and really the opposite of the desolation in my head. Queue an afternoon of tacos and driving around with good music and talking to strangers and we found spot in the backlot of a local construction business that would allow me to get most of the look I wanted in-camera, needing only to remove some trees and add some mountains in photoshop (more on that below). Permission was procured (always an important step when doing a shoot, contrary to the popular idiom of “better to ask for forgiveness”) and a shoot date was set.
Our last step was to create uniforms for our ragtag gang of intergalactic retirees. The silver suits and visors were easily found on Amazon (here’s a link). We also bought cheap headsets, wooden dowels, and foam balls and drilled/glued them together like the manly men that we are.
Intergalactic weapons were proving to be difficult because I wanted something that looked more “Men In Black” in terms of scale and ridiculousness compared a standard earth gun. Lo and behold, I found a stash of old nerf guns + bullets on marketplace that my kids could enjoy after the shoot! 2 cans of silver spray paint later and we were in business.
Every Trekkie knows that a proper landing party needs both muscle and science. So in addition to space guns, I wanted a handheld item resemblant of a tricorder (scanner / data collector). A few years ago we lost a dear friend and fellow photographer Bob Kelly. Upon his passing I inherited his Yashica twin reflex camera and it turns out it fit the retro otherworldly vibe perfectly. In addition to looking cool, it’s peppers these images with a deep sentiment and gratitude for me. Bob was my 6th grade teacher and one of my biggest cheerleaders when I needed it most. I like to think these images are giving him a good belly laugh in the great beyond. Pair the camera with my seldom-used light meter (proud chimper here), and we’ve outfitted our science officer.
Next step, shoot day! We met mid-afternoon at Alan’s salon to hope our Amazon outfits fit (they did!) and get our space explorers styled before driving out into the heat. We were joined by Alan’s co-worker Emma Grice and our friend Roxanne Bappe, who were helpful hands on deck and took the BTS pics you see in this post.
I didn’t pre-plan my shots with specificity. Often client shoots operate that way, but when I’m creating for myself I like to leave room for the flow state to hit and for discoveries to be made. I had the rough idea of creating images that would be at home in comic book frames: a few wider scene setting frames, then some individual portraits of each character, then fill in remaining time with action shots until either the talent fades or we lose the light. Everything would be captured like a proper promotional shoot for a fictitious television show. We parked the truck in front of the big gravel pile and framed around that, for interplanetary believability. We started with the full group scene-setters.
In the next clip you can see how we framed around the sun as a backlight (for those great shadows) and filled with a bare Godox 600 flash and a silver reflector. I wanted everything to be kept at a lower-contrast for that 60’s nostalgia vibe, so I kept a close eye on keeping my shadows light.
Here is a build of what was captured in camera and what was added in post. Trees removed, background mountains and foreground rocks added + some clouds for good measure. It’s important to note that no skin was retouched on any of these because this crew is perfect and gorgeous just the way they are! I only modified the scene to better fit the story.
It was HOT on this day and Frank overheated pretty quickly in that silver suit so we pivoted into a femme duo. The following lit portraits were captured with the Godox flash through a 48” octagon using high speed sync to blur the background. I refrained from adding clouds on these because I found it more striking to have warm skin against blue sky on the close ups.
Here’s where we started losing daylight and I pivoted to some shots with our talent inside the truck. I had an image in my head of the truck jumping into hyperspace, but it required lighting my subjects from inside the cab to give the illusion of them being lit by the ship’s internal lights. I changed my setup from flash to LED (nanlight pavotubes, if you must know) to achieve this illusion. LED’s aren’t very bright compared to the sun (or flash), so I was saving this one for the end to ensure a proper exposure.
This was my trickiest shot in post, and to be honest it’s the shot that held this project up from being posted for so long because it required a lot of experimentation to get right! Here’s the camera capture through final edit:
I explained what I wanted for expressions and the ladies went all out! We were laughing so hard, this was definitely a highlight moment for all of us. Second shot, same lighting:
Then for the icing on the cake: Frank rallied for some individual character portraits backlit by the epic Cybertruck high-beams!
I didn’t anticipate shooting with the truck’s headlights so I didn’t bring a smoke machine, but we did have an Alan and a lot of dirt. Often an Alan is just the magic required to pull everything together (as demonstrated in the following clip).
In finale, upon getting back to my car I realized I’d left my trunk open and killed my battery! A failed jump attempt by Roxanne and a new car battery from Walmart later, I finally got to go home to unload and make up for my caloric deficit (Mexican food, if you must know). Not my most graceful ending to a shoot, but it makes for a good memory with good friends.
Overall this image set makes me very happy (success!) and I hope they bring you a smile. Even better, if you’re a creative reading this I hope you’re encouraged to get off yer duff and go make something for yourself!
Thus concludes my first substack. Drop a note with where you’re from, your favorite frame, or any questions you have! BTS from a recent project with Caitlin Clark is in the queue, among other things. And in the meantime, you can find me on instagram.
A photographer, a writer, a drummer, and a ballerina. This man does it all.
Yeah.....so good as usual!!!! What a fun project to read and enjoy out of the everyday guck/yuck we deal with in the business.