Annie Leibovitz

My absolute biggest living favorite among photographers is Annie Leibovitz. I got lucky and found a video on YouTube about one of her interesting photo shoots. It was also interesting to compare with one of my similar photo shoots.

Queen of England Elizabeth

3 weeks of preparation + 11 assistants + window light + a little Photoshop + excellent photographer Annie Leibovitz + 1 hour of shooting = excellent frames. You can see that all the work is directed only and exclusively to get an excellent result.

Final result :





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As you can see, Annie had her way and shot without the crown.

Imants Lancmanis

When I found this Annie Leibovitz video and photos, I remembered about one of my photo shoots, where I photographed the highly esteemed director of Rundāle Palace, Imants Lancmanis.
Unfortunately, I didn't have assistants, and also didn't have preparation time. To get a good result, I took lights. Of course, I warned the editor that I needed an hour of time to shoot properly. I went to the photo shoot together with a journalist.  During the interview, I slowly started setting up lights to not disturb the journalist. When the interview ended, I started shooting, but unfortunately the journalist's interview continued even while I was shooting. I couldn't shoot properly because all of Imant's attention was on the conversation. It was quite uncomfortable to interrupt a conversation between two respectable people.  Somehow I managed to shoot a few frames. Then I persuaded him to walk around the palace to divert attention from the interview, but no luck. The journalist was all the time beside him chatting with the director. The journalist was surprised both by the lights I brought and by my extra walking around where I photographed in various places. She was probably used to the photographer clicking clicking and taking photos in parallel during the interview. Grrr...
So you can compare how photo shoots happen abroad and here with us. Abroad, for any serious photo shoot, all efforts go toward the result. With us, the biggest efforts are spent to economize resources, both financial and time. Often it happens like this when you are ready for everything to get a good result, but you are thrown into unpredictable and uncontrollable conditions that make the work process difficult.

My photos:

I only now dug out these photos from the archive and tried to process them in a similar style as Annie Leibovitz's photos look.

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