Surreal Soiree | Salvador Dali @ The High Museum

While Leah and I were in Indiana this past weekend – our Interns handled the Portrait Booth at the High Museum for the grand opening of the Salvador Dali exhibit. Aside from the fact that hey – it’s the High Museum of Art! – it was also really cool that we could count on our Interns to not only do an okay job – but to do a GREAT JOB. Alumni Intern Paralee was head photographer and brought along Alumni Intern Vania, and then also New Interns Christy and Robby.

We talk a lot about how we really want our interns to get a lot of experience shooting a variety of subject matter, and generally just being better photographers all around – so honestly, it was really nice to be able to count on Paralee to do a good job for us. Especially considering the fact that our Portrait booths aren’t exactly simple.

You can tell that we use a white backdrop, but we wash it out as much as we can so that it’s mostly just a clean white background – and you don’t see the ‘fabric’ as much, but then we also use four (4) speedlights strategically placed for shadows and some dynamic lighting to make things more interesting. We don’t want flat light. We want shadows. We want depth. We want cool photos that you won’t get from anyone with a portrait booth setup. And we know you won’t get photos like these from anyone else, because honestly no one else works as hard as we do at Light. You’ve seen other photobooth photos and they might have one, maybe two light sources at best – and they’re always just throwing flat light at the subjects.

And when you consider that Paralee and the team ran through roughly 160 ‘sessions’ in about 4 hours – that’s a lot of variation in compositions, and light, and well – it just takes a lot of energy to shoot at that pace over that length of time. Setting up your lights for the most flexibility is crucial. We make our interns learn how to shoot on full manual – so knowing how to adjust for various conditions is pretty important – on top of just directing that volume of people to keep the line flowing, while also getting great photos.

We can’t express how proud we are of Paralee for leading this job.

And although we want our internship to always be a free training course – we don’t expect anyone to take on a job like this just because they’re our intern, or as a free favor. Since we know what it takes to shoot something like this, at that pace, for that long – Paralee was compensated the full amount for the job, directly from the High Museum. Have you noticed how our photography internship isn’t like any other internship out there?

For us, being able to teach someone who didn’t go to photography school on how to handle a job a like this after a short 3 month internship – I think that’s something we can be proud of – especially since we’re teaching our interns to not be button pushers, but quality photographers who know what they’re doing, whether it’s natural light or off-camera flash.

Obviously these photos aren’t all technically ‘perfect’ – but hey, two minutes per group remember? Just think what the photos would look like if they had a whopping five minutes to spend per group! ha.

In case you’re new to us here at LeahAndMark.com – we recently took on a new batch of 15 interns. This week we’re holding our Lighting 101 class and then next month we’ll have our Photography Business/Marketing class. We teach the photography marketing class because we think that most photography schools don’t do a good job of teaching their students how to get business, and survive as working photographers. How many art school graduates do you know that aren’t using their art/photography degrees to do what they want? And instead they’re working at office day jobs, or whatever job they can get?

We want our photography interns to succeed at whatever level they feel comfortable, and teaching them how to market themselves as photographers is part of that.

Click Here For the Entire Gallery.

And check out Paralee’s Photography Website Here.

Thank you.

LeahAndMark.com | High Museum | Surreal Soiree | Salvador Dali | Photos