After a really busy week I was thrilled when I found the new album by Mabon in the mail today. Their new record is entitled “Stampede of the Damned” and I was fortunate enough to shoot the cover for it:

To create the cover image we shot all of the band members individually against a black background in my studio. Each exposure lasted 6 seconds, while I had the modeling lights of my Elinchrom flash heads running. Within those 6 seconds of exposure I asked the band to move around, kicking and screaming as if in agony. During the long exposure I manually triggered the strobes to freeze a few moments in time, while the rest of the movement was smeared due to the long exposure. The resulting images looked something like this:

Multiple frames likes these of all of the band members where then composed into one burst of humanoid emotion… at least that’s what it felt like while I composed the final result.

Once again this project proved to me that working with musicians is one of the most rewarding things to do as a visual creative. Mabon’s new record is available now through their website!

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Posted by nicolas_henri on February 5th, 2010 :: Filed under Artist Technique, Photography, Post Production
Tags :: band, Composing, long exposure, Mabon, music, Stampede of the Damned, strobe

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My new show GLAUBE | LIEBE | HOFFNUNG (Faith, Love, Hope) has finally opened last weekend (Details here and here) and I am very happy how well it was received! As promised in my last post I will be sharing a lot of background info and BTS video from the shoots involved in the production. The project itself derives it’s title from three principal images. Today we will start with a closer look at the creation of GLAUBE (Faith).

It all started back in November 2008, when we set out on a beautiful autumn day to create the image above. In facty it started a lot earlier than that, because the planning and pre-production for this one took almost two months. And as the title of the image suggests, quite a bit of it had to do with keeping the faith…

(Keep on reading + video after the break)

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Posted by nicolas_henri on November 5th, 2009 :: Filed under Artist Technique, Exhibition, Lighting, Making Of, On Location, Photography
Tags :: Behind the scenes, Elinchrom, Exhibition, Faith, Glaube, Hoffnung, Hope, Liebe, Lighting, Logistics, Love, Making Of, video

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This one has been a while in the making…

I always try to think of fashion in new ways. Fashion is, to a large extent, about texture, about contrast and form. Some time ago I came up with the idea of a fashion shoot made of nothing but shreds of paper. The dress, the setting, everything! I did this as a personal project, not with a commercial, but a fine art afterlife in mind.

I approached Jana Keller, designer of RoyalBLUSH to craft a paper dress for me. She was all over it and started sketching right away.

Early on I realized we would need a special model to make this one work. I turned to Option Model in Zürich for suggestions and it soon became clear that a black model would provide the necessary edge for the idea. We cast the talented and lovely Mariatu, who performed admirably!

Before the shoot me and my beloved girlfriend Fräulein Scharlach spent three evenings shredding over 100 square meters of paper and another evening rigging it all up in the studio.

The Lighting setup consisted of a beauty dish on a boom above the set, which served as the main light and was balanced for normal exposure. A strip light, about one stop over, was used as a rim light from the right. As fill I set up a large softobox camera left, dialed down 1 stop. In addition to this I used a gridded spot, about half a stop over, as a little kicker, slightly off camera axis to add some light to Mariatu’s face and torso. (I used Broncolor generators and heads)

Hair & Make Up was done by the incredibly talented Rachel Wolfisberg. She’s always full of fresh ideas and just great to have around!

And this is how it all turned out:

But wait, there’s more! Where there’s paper… someone might get the idea to paint on it! Check out the behind the scenes video for all the technicolor juice… Enjoy!

NICOLAS HENRI: PAPER - Behind the scenes from Nicolas Henri on Vimeo.

(If you are reading this via email, click here to see the video!)

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Posted by nicolas_henri on May 16th, 2009 :: Filed under Artist Technique, Lighting, Making Of, Photography, Uncategorized
Tags :: Behind the scenes, color, Fashion, Making Of, Paper, video

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