The Comedians Part I - Portrait Photography of Creative People
In A downtown Bend portrait photography session with a comedian
I first did portraits of Morgan Preston many, many years ago for a Bulletin story. If I remember correctly we did the portraits down near the corner of Wall St. and Franklin Ave. for the story. He enjoyed working with me, especially loving my constant drive for creativity and not stopping doing pictures until we had what we needed for the story. Here’s how long ago I did the story - I’m pretty sure the Profoto lighting wasn’t used because I hadn’t made the initial investment in the system. I was either not using any lights or I was using a Nikon flash with some sort of trigger. Might even have been using the all-but-useless coiled cord trigger. (Like a landline telephone receiver cord) The cords worked until you had to be further than two feet away from the flash. Then it would pull the flash with stand and umbrella down to the ground. I broke a few expensive flashes with those cords.
So anyway, he came back to me a few months later hoping for some promotional portraits of him for whatever he had going on at the time. We hit downtown Bend with my lights and did some portraits. I’m 99% sure these pictures were shot with the Nikon flash and phone cord hookup. So you’ll notice in these pictures the light was never very far from Morgan. I might’ve been using two cords hooked together to give me about three feet of working space. Let me say that switching to the Profoto B1 really was a major game changer in the way I could work.
So we got busy doing pictures until after the sun went down and I have to say working with Morgan was pure creative joy. It made me wish I could be one of those Hollywood celebrity portrait photographers. Hanging out bouncing ideas back and forth and then being able to have the time to try them out was so much fun I’m here blogging about it all these years later.
I’ll save some of the pictures for future blog posts, but here’s a couple from that day.


