For me, I was busier during spring break that I am during most weeks of school. I have had a large shoot in the planning stages for the past couple weeks, and I decided that, because it involved a couple days of travel for me, spring break would be the perfect time to shoot it. 

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I have been working on a couple different projects during my second semester here at Columbia. For one of those projects, I have been using well-known images from pop culture. I then find a group of people to very loosely act out those images. The recreations are different than the original image and would be mostly unrecognizable to most viewers.

One of the things I wanted to recreate was the Britney Spears music video for her first single “Baby One More Time.” Other then the people to stand in the image, the thing I thought I’d have the most trouble getting hold of was a high school to shoot the image in. High schools tend to be very touchy about just letting a photographer come in and use their building for images.

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While looking for models to stand in the image, I was reintroduced to someone that had modeled for me almost 5 years ago. At the time she had been 13, but now she was 18, and she attended the same high school that I had attended. So it occurred to me to contact my old high school and see if it might be possible to shoot my image there. They still remembered me there and were nice enough to indulge me and allow me the access that I needed.

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My model gathered some of her friends and got all of the releases signed. I also realized that with this type of image, with the number of people involved and the amount of equipment I needed, there was no way that I could handle the image by myself. So I contacted my undergrad institution, which is in the same city, and asked if there were a few students that might like to come along to a shoot and help. I was lucky enough to have three students offer to help. I remember assisting photographers/artists that I admired when I was in undergrad. I did it to see how they shot and lit there images, and it was actually some of the most educational of my experiences in undergrad.

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We all showed up around 1 and left about 3. It was an intense experience for me as it is the most complex image I have ever done. Because of the size of the space I elected to shoot in, I had to shoot a number of different images and them composite them together. This was also necessary because I am working with a new panoramic format that involves stitching a number of 4×5 images together.

This was just one of a number of shoots I did while on break, and as much work as it was, the shooting is a small part of what I do. So now the real intense, time consuming work begins!