Behind the Scenes - Seth Rogen for Maxim

      This is an image from a shoot we did a few years ago with Seth Rogen for Maxim magazine. Seth was promoting Zack and Miri Make a Porno at the time. The magazine had ideas of what they wanted for the shoot, but during the flight to LA the morning of the photoshoot I had the idea to have Seth humping himself on the bed.

It is always easier to show the client what you’re interested in rather than trying to tell them, so my Robb Epifano (my LA first assistant) volunteered to do the test. The great thing about shooting digital is that we were able to have an image composited before Seth ever arrived to the set.

When Seth saw the image he said “Well, I guess I have to do that.” And just to be fair I took a few shots of myself…

I wanted the image to have a voyeuristic feel, as if we had just opened the door and stumbled upon Seth videotaping himself while watching The Simpsons. I always start with my key light, in this case we used a Profoto Fresnel housing shooting through a scrim with a rectangle cut out of it to mimic the look of light pouring through an open door.

I always start with one light and build from there. I shot a frame using just the key light to get an idea of what we were working with and then filled the rest of the space with a soft overhead light to mimic a ceiling light. There was some ambient light in the room so I dragged the shutter a bit to pick up the table lamps.

We had a couple white V-flats outside the window with a strobe shooting directly into them to make it appear as if natural light was coming through the blinds.

We worked with Seth to choose the images and composite them. After some color correction and curves/saturation adjustments we had our final image.

Maxim never actually ran the image in the magazine, but they were great in allowing us some room for experimentation.

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