Rick Wenner • New York City

Let’s end the year off right with one of my favorite shoots from the year. The Given Motion, a Long Island original band, were an amazing group of guys to work with. To give you all a little back story on how this came about, I first met lead singer C.J. at the Apple Store where he works. C.J. sold me my new iPhone and we got to talking about music and that his band just won a major Long Island radio station competition. I showed him some of my work and gave him my business card in hopes of working with him in the future. Long story short, a few months go by, we exchange a couple emails, have a sit down meeting and they met with a few other local photographers. They did things the right way by looking around to see who fit their needs the best and I was very happy to hear that they chose me for their project. I had a lot of ideas brewing in my mind to shoot for their upcoming album “Human Dictionary”. My goal was to shoot a few ideas for the album cover and website images as well as a few additional setups, all while keeping the images fairly simple and interesting. The shoot was really fun time. I mean, you can’t really have a bad time throwing books and papers around and making a huge mess. Throw in a fog machine and then a killer skyline view with gorgeous light at Attic Studios in Long Island City and I was in heaven for this shoot. I’ll be posting a behind-the-scenes video sometime very soon showing how all these photos were created, so make sure to check back here soon.

Ever since first seeing Nashville, TN photographer Jeremy Cowart’s work, I’ve been wanting to experiment with using a projector in my photos. I figured that this shoot with The Given Motion was better than any. Of course I saved this setup for the end of the day after I had secured all photos that we needed. Here are a few of my favorites from experimenting with the projector.

If you’ve made it this far into this post, leave a few comments below and let me know what you think of The Given Motion’s photos. I’m also interested to know if you are looking for additional information on my shoots (lighting diagrams, etc).