Justin Bettman

Little Ibarra

Justin Bettman — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:35:34 +0000

I hung out with my friend and fellow photographer EDIphotoeye a bunch while I was in NorCal. We were hanging out at her place one evening and her sister volunteered to be the subject for one of our photos so we decided to do a spur of the moment shoot. Her sister was really easy and fun to work with!

Cycle

Justin Bettman — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:22:07 +0000

I haven’t done any crazy composites lately and I had the urge to do one when I was back up North for the holidays. My friend Maoz Friedman is a cyclist and I wanted to do a surreal shot of him riding. I shot the background assets in Half Moon Bay and shot Maoz outside of his house. I was pretty happy with the result. Below are the behind the scenes photos and the final image:

The Relay Company

Justin Bettman — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:07:47 +0000

The night after I shot The Neighbourhood in the studio, I went and shot my buddies Adam and Stephen Mariucci recording some jams for The Relay Company‘s new record. Everything was sounding rad, much different than any of their other work. Here’s Adam singing:

The Neighbourhood

Justin Bettman — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:57:20 +0000

My buddy Jesse was recording a new EP with his band The Neighbourhood in Santa Monica. They invited me to come to the studio and take some documentary pictures which was a blast. Unfortunately the lighting was pretty dark but I managed to get a few rad photos.

Listen to their jams! Wires is my favorite

Mallory Jesser

Justin Bettman — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:53:04 +0000

After doing the test shoot with Emily Becklund, I wanted to shoot a more conceptual underwater series. I think things went much smoother after getting the hang of shooting underwater and having goggles this time! My friend Mallory Jesser from Ford Models was kind enough to do it with me on a 50 degree cloudy day and the shots turned out great!

Here are some black and white studio shots from the day:

Emily Becklund

Justin Bettman — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:38:16 +0000

These past few months I’ve been terrible about blogging so I’m going to try and play some catch up. I’ve been curious about shooting underwater for quite some time and I finally purchased a cheap underwater housing unit for my camera to see what it was like. Since my housing unit is really cheap (professional ones are close to the price of a camera body) and I didn’t have goggles for this shoot, it was definitely hard to see exactly what I was shooting. In the end I’m really happy with how everything turned out, they look raw and real and I think Emily’s red hair photographs really well underwater!

After doing this shoot, I realized how much I love shooting underwater; nothing like beats soft and elegant lighting.

Jeffree Star

Justin Bettman — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:21:18 +0000

Earlier this year Jeffree Star contacted me to do a shoot but I was traveling up north at the time and the shoot never panned out. I contacted Jeffree a few weeks ago and asked him if he was still interested in shooting and we finally did the shoot. First we did a bunch of studio shots against a blue and white backgrounds. It’s always fun photographing someone who wears lots of make-up because the skin becomes really reflective with the strobes.

After the studio shots, I shot Jeffree in my alley for a composite I had planned. Here is the behind the scenes shot:

Final Composite

Jenny May

Justin Bettman — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:38:36 +0000

I hadn’t done a fashion shoot in a while and decided to do one a couple of weeks ago. My friend Jenny May was the subject for the shoot; she used to model for Ford and then took some time off for school. I was really happy with how everything turned out. We didn’t really have any direction going into the shoot or even know where we were going to shoot. We ended up finding an awesome hill north of downtown that worked perfectly. While the photo looks pretty surreal, there was almost no post production, it was basically 100% lighting.

Behind the scenes

Here are some studio shots we did before the on location photos:

The Loneliest Meal

Justin Bettman — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:26:23 +0000

I did this shoot a few weeks ago and never got around to blogging it. Recently I’ve started to appreciate darker forms of photography and that every photograph doesn’t have to be positive. In all of my photographs, I strive for a reaction; I’m equally satisfied when one of my photographs evokes happiness as a I am when a photograph evokes disgust. As long as there is a powerful emotional reaction, I feel I have done my job.

I wanted to leave the meaning of this photograph up for interpretation. When I was first storyboarding ideas for the concept I had one meaning in mind but once we started shooting that meaning changed for me. Huge thanks to my friend Julie Brigati for being the subject and letting me fine tune every light for hours on end. I always find it funny that some people get hundreds of photographs they’re happy with in less than an hour and that I spend hours on end trying to perfect one photo.

Here is the behind the scenes lighting:

Here is the final image:

Jacqueline Corcos

Justin Bettman — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 01:55:50 +0000

From the looks of my blog, it seems like I haven’t been shooting at all lately but in reality I’ve just been so busy, I haven’t been blogging. I’ve done more shoots that I’ve been happy with these past 3 weeks then I have in a long time.

I did a shoot with model/actress Jacqueline Corcos a couple of weeks ago. We wanted to shoot in an area with lots of grass during the middle of the day to really bring focus to the green. I decided to shoot at the cornfield projects north of downtown but when we got there, we saw that there was a bike race going on. So we decided to see if there was any place that would work there and luckily on the north end of the field we found a patch of grass that worked great. We shot for about 45 minutes before having 2 cops arrive telling us we needed permits to shoot (duhhh). Who knew that a photographer with an octobank shooting on the edge of a field required 2 cops time and energy!