All and All It’s Just Another
Pizza In The Wall...
We have now shot the cover of the Chicago Creative Directory for the fourth consecutive year...the ‘2010’ book...quite a distinct pleasure and privilege. The request for the cover image was to simply show a ‘Chicago' style pizza. The image needed a different setting other than the surrounds of a red and white checkered tablecloth. I wanted to give a photo-journalistic look to tell a story that was really Chicago...in a food, fashion, location shot. The impromptu nature of the pizza in progress works well for the editorial feel.
The art gallery was constructed in the studio. The artwork (pizza), our ‘fine art’ admirer, bench/concrete floor, and a “Crown Fountain” wall from Chicago’s Millennium Park were all layered together. The warmth of the city lights were great for the red theme of the CCD cover. Plus our own gallery was situated right next to the Chicago Art Institute.
We built the pizza from scratch with the help of a famous ‘Chicago style’ pizza maker...who made our base pizza and provided us with all of the cheese, sauce and pepperoni to create our artwork. For the location shoot, I waited ‘til the screen was blank after I zeroed in the exposure of the night scene. This was to keep the authenticity of the Millennium Park fountain bricks. I needed the pattern of the translucent bricks of the fountain wall to be part of our ‘Pizza in the Wall’ image. The identical raw capture was processed twice, keeping in mind my additional need for the bricks. The image of the bricks was inverted to negative, raised the contrast level, converted to grayscale, then back to RGB. The bricks were then layered with the lady in the pizza gallery, using “hard light” at 50% opacity. The high contrast processing helped our shot but also showed pronounced artifacts in the bricks that were cleaned up. And...there are many, many bricks in that wall!
After adding the detail of a cloud pattern to the sky, we had our picture, in a picture, in a picture...the CCD 2010. Story complete of “Just another Pizza in the Wall” and
Don Levey Makes People Happy.
