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 The other aspect of the environment I wanted to create was the smoke from the roof pipes that would have been there if we were shooting on a real roof. In order to do this I brought in a fog machine and wind machine to control the direction the smoke would travel in. I also wanted him in a long overcoat, the kind of coat you don’t see in Los Angeles, the kind of coat that’s very New York. His office instructed me not to bring clothes, that he would wear what he had on. Working with Tyler Pappas, my former photo editor from GQ and the producer for this shoot, I made the case anyway to bring a wardrobe stylist on board and bring some overcoats. Tyler agreed and we had someone pick up some supplemental clothing for the shoot.
I lit the shot with a Dyna-Lite M2000wi pack using a Chimera Medium Strip softbox with a fabric “egg-crate” grid in the box. I used the grid to keep the light from the softbox from spilling on the railing and background wall that I hated to begin with. I set the power on the strobe to overpower the ambient light and the environment to have more dramatic impact. I also placed it far to the side to create shadow and depth in the image and still light Scorsese's face. After looking at the image on the capture company’s (Image Mechanics) 30-inch monitor on site, I realized that the left side of the image needed a little more light, so I added another Dyna-Lite pack with a 20º grid spot on the head. This was used to hit his coat and open up all the dark parts of the image. While this was being set up we were also setting up a gray seamless paper and lights inside to do his portraits for his column in the magazine.
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| Michael Grecco's lighting scheme for his portrait of Oscar-winning film director Martin Scorsese, shot on the rooftop of New York City's Directors Guild of America. |
 When Scorsese arrived, I banged out about 120 images on the gray seamless and another 150 outside. The cool thing was I could tell him exactly what I wanted and he delivered it like the best actor, knowing exactly what the director, me in this case, wanted. We did it all, grooming, gray seamless, a wardrobe change and the shots outside, in just 40 minutes -- and in the middle of it all it started to rain!
Watch Grecco's stop-motion video of the shoot: www.michaelgrecco.com/scorsese.
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