Celebrity Cover Shoot with Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller Rogen
In December 2020, I got the assignment for a celebrity cover shoot for Brain & Life magazine with Seth Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, in Los Angeles. The story was highlighting their nonprofit organization, HFC, educating about Alzheimer's disease.
Editorial portrait shoots are inherently unpredictable. There is usually only a limited amount of time I get with my subject, and I must be ready to improvise on the spot if the planned shots, out of whatever reason, don't work on the day of the photoshoot.
In this case, I got 60 minutes to shoot two cover versions with the Rogen couple for the English and Spanish versions of the magazine, plus images for the table of contents and the cover story's opener.
Photographing two people in 60 minutes is like getting 30 minutes with one subject. In that time, I have to build a rapport with two people I have never met before, direct two people, and pay attention to twice as many details. There also had to be a wardrobe change during the given time, and there were two different sets. Well, and then there was the pandemic.
On the day I left for Los Angeles, the city went into a complete lockdown. Restaurants had to close outside dining, and Samy's, the equipment rental place, wasn't sure if they could even stay open. Due to Covid, we had to shoot outside on the gated parking lot of the Rogens' office but make it look like a studio setup. Fortunately, the magazine's cover has an easy-to-replicate style in an outdoor setting as long as harsh daylight doesn't get in the way. I researched the location online, and with the help of one of my must-have apps, SunSurveyor, I was able to schedule the shoot taking directional sunlight out of the equation without rigging major scrims.
There was a backup plan for everything except for the subjects or the photographer getting COVID before the shoot. So I locked myself up in my hotel room unless I had to go out for the photoshoot or the CPR test.
Throw a pandemic on top of an unpredictable celebrity cover shoot, and you might have an idea of how nervous I was until the Rogens arrived on set. From that point on, it was pretty smooth sailing. Lauren and Seth were fantastic to work with in this tense environment. Sixty minutes later, and after some air-hugs, they got into their car and went back to their home in the hills, and I was ready for my one-person pandemic after-party. Too bad LA was in this post-apocalyptic stage with everything locked down. So, it was down to me and Uber-Eats.
