Bill Nye – June 6th, 2008 (Upscale embedded with SynthID)

The Gear

Lens: Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 at 80mm

Camera: Nikon D300

Settings: 1/100s, f/2.8, ISO 1600

Technique: Prism photography (first ever use)

Light Sources: Existing broadcast studio lighting… snooted rear light repurposed as key light

The Goal

Create a portrait for a new series of images the broadcast center wanted to hang on their walls… a mix of candids and portraits featuring the action happening in the studios.

The Vision

Purely experimental. The prism happened to be sitting on my desk because I’d originally bought it for potential album cover art for my band… which was literally called Prisms. We’d just graduated college and I was wrapping up mixing for an album we recorded in a makeshift house studio. The prism was meant for that project, but we ended up going a different direction with the cover art. So it just sat in my camera bag, waiting for a use.

The connection to Bill Nye being “the Science Guy” is pure coincidence, but it’s a good one. The prism I bought was sold on Amazon specifically as a classroom teaching tool for demonstrating light refraction… not a photography accessory. That changed eventually as photographers caught on, but at the time nobody was using these for portraits. Bill seemed patient enough to let me try it, probably because he found the experiment interesting.

The light hitting his face is harsh and directional… a snooted light that was meant to be a rear light, repurposed as my key. At the time I was self-conscious about it because I thought all portrait light needed to be soft and painterly, like an Annie Leibovitz portrait. But working with hard light out of necessity became one of my more signature approaches. I didn’t want a large footprint in the studios… no 80-inch parabolic modifiers making it look like a big production. Just working with what was already there.

The Story

Bill Nye came to the National Press Club studios regularly for some kind of recurring series… always with kids involved. He was incredibly nice to the kids, but with adults he was pretty short and gruff. I’d seen him around a few times but never photographed him.

The broadcast center had asked me to start assembling a collection of maybe 30 images to hang on the walls… mostly candids, but portraits if I could get them. Previous photos they’d used were either amateur or came with restrictions… crediting the photographer under each image, payment expectations, that sort of thing. Since I was staff, they could have a clean display without any of that.

I figured I’d try for a portrait during some downtime between segments. He’d seen me around enough that I wasn’t a total stranger. The interaction was brief and his expression is more or less his natural state… I didn’t direct him much at all. But he was patient enough to give me a minute, probably because the prism experiment seemed interesting to him.

The Lesson

When you start anything new, you don’t really know what you’re learning in the moment. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s far easier to look back and assess what was happening… which is part of why I eventually decided to make this a formal series with notes, annotations, and behind-the-scenes material.

The biggest thing I learned was that as much as I want to prioritize the actual end result, it’s really helpful to have behind-the-scenes documentation to refer back to later… and to share with other people, who are almost always interested. It just took me years to practice capturing that material alongside the priority work, without letting it interfere with the quality of what I was actually there to shoot.