I had an interesting photo session recently, taken in a seedy New Jersey motel, located at the intersection of two major highways. The shoot was for publicity photos and CD cover art for a new music artist by the name of Ron C. Thomas. You can see his music videos here on youtube. He's a good looking young man, so he naturally takes good photos.
His most recent music video features him singing in the midst of a party, so Ron's agent, Norm Harley, had the idea of having Ron in a dive motel room the morning after the party from hell. Ron lives and works in Philadelphia, so Norm browsed the internet looking for Philly photographers, and he liked my style - often a little grungy with texture, grain and moodiness. This sounded like a totally fun shoot, so I was more than happy to accept the job. After Norm "trashed" the room, we got started. For the sake of clarity, Norm brought his industrial strength vacuum with and he thoroughly put the room back to shape afterwards.
There were little snafu's, such as the portable helium machine not working, so we had to blow up balloons the old fashioned way. We stuck them to the ceiling using good old fashioned duct tape. We also had empty wine bottles, a small disco ball, glitter and confetti to round out the bad "morning after". I've done commercial shoots before, but this was definitely amongst the most entertaining! Thank you Norm Harley and Ron C. Thomas, for a great shoot!
All photographs © Colleen D. Gjefle, 2012
