Michael Helms has been a successful photographer in Los Angeles for 35 years. He has photographed some of Hollywood's most notable celebrities, including Kate Hudson, Tim Curry and Angelina Jolie.
From shooting documentaries on the orphanage of Katmandu, Nepal to photographing the cannibals of Papua, New Guinea, to hang gliding in the high Sierra, and even to the depths of the ocean taking photos of sea life in Bonaire. Michael's work and range of experience are extensive.
I decided to make a bowl. I chose a kind of teal color with a red rim. Here we are shaping it a bit before blowing again to enlarge it.
Here I’m expanding the opening in the bubble to create a bowl. It takes a little pressure at first and getting the bowl perfectly round is tricky.
Still expanding the bubble to form the bowl while the glass is red hot. Then I changed the angle of the tongs to flare the top of the bowl a bit.
In these last two photos, you can see the finished bowl. It has a bubble in the glass, a flaw but some glass blowers think of it as character and leave them in. I like the “flaw”.
I suppose it’s a good thing that after 37 years of shooting head shots for actors, that I still enjoy it. I attribute this to the fact that I find people endlessly fascinating and what better place to be a head shot photographer than in Los Angeles! I get all sorts of fascinating characters through my photo studio and I sometimes think it should be a sit com.
In the past, an actor would get a recommendation from his Agent or manager for what head shot photographer to go visit. Usually an actor would meet with four or five photographers, look at their portfolios, check out the studio, and choose who they felt would be the best for the images they needed. This decision making process was good for everyone, actor and photographer alike although it required the photographer to sit through hours of seemingly endless and unnecessary recitations of resumes.
While I understand the concept that an actor wants the photographer to capture a certain essence, it has little bearing on whether or not that actor will actually book a job. The reason for this is that very very few actors see their casting. Every actor has an idea of the roles they want to play in film, commercials, or on stage but very few actors understand that it is a business and they will be cast according to how they look to a casting office.
An example of this would be a girl who came to my studio for head shots and she handed me photos of fashion models and proclaimed,”I want photos like these!”. What amused me was that MY idea of her casting was that she would be prefect in a role as a midwest farmers wife…perhaps pulling a plow. Suffice it to say she was NOT in shape for Victoria’s Secret.
Agents in Los Angeles have lists of head shot photographers that they recommend and I am fortunate to be on almost all of those lists. So, it presented me with a challenge, because, knowing her agent, if I shot images the agent liked, she would be unhappy but if I shot images she liked, the agent would be displeased.
I suggested to her that she show her agent what wonderful versatility she had as an actress. I told her she should shoot some rather plain images, then we could add more makeup and fluff her hair for more sexy images. She reluctantly agreed.
A week went by and I got a call from her and I winced as I asked her how she liked her photos. This was in the days of film so it would take a few days to process. She told me she was really happy with “some of them but some of the others she liked less”. I asked her if she had shown them to her agent and she frustratingly replied,”YES…and you won’t believe what he said to me. He said he liked the plain ones and could use those but the pretty shots he didn’t like. He said to me, these are pretty but I can’t use them because you aren’t pretty!”
“Yikes!” I responded,”What did you do!?”
“Well, I’m looking for another agent!” she growled.
I have had actors in my studio who did their best to imitate Robert DeNiro, sexy women who wanted to play “smart” roles, nerdy looking guys who wanted to be James Bond, and the aforementioned chubette who wanted to be Cindy Crawford.
When an actor walks through my doors, I know in the first minute how I am going to light him. I already know what roles he will get. I already know, after years doing head shots in Los Angeles, how an actor will be marketed. But it is not my job to make those decisions but rather to provide and actor with what type of photos HE/SHE wants. I make suggestions, I talk it over with all my clients, I can tell them what wardrobe I think will work, and I can let each individual know what the trends in head shots are current, but ultimately every actor needs to do their homework and see this as a business and realize they are a product and how best to market that product.
The idea is to have a head shot that gets you called in to a casting that, when you arrive and look around the casting office, you see actors who are in the same category. You don’t want to look around and see people who are 40 years older.
If an actor looks at TV, film, and commercials and identifies characters that “look like” him, he will know how to dress for a photo shoot. Basically an actor needs a smiling head shot for commercials and a more serious shot for theatrical purposes. Nothing more.
Casting offices generally know what type they are going to choose for any given role, so if you got a call, you have a shot!
I flew hang gliders for about 34 years but officially retired about 6 years ago. It was a sad day and I miss flying terribly. Today I drove over to the place where all the hang gliders land.
Soon as we exchanged greetings my friend Joe offered,”Hey wanna fly this glider?” and I said “Nah, I don’t have a harness” then another pilot/friend, Fred volunteered,”I’ve got a harness”. Me,”I don’t have a helmet”. Fred,”I have a helmet, too!”
Next thing I knew, I was headed up the mountain with a truck load of fellow flyers. We quickly set up our flying machines then ran off the mountain into the beautiful sky. I visited places a few miles away that I hadn’t seen in a long time and watched as a Red Tailed Hawk circled in an updraft hundreds of feet below me.
So many memories from hundreds of hours floating thousands of feet above the Earth were flooding my brain.
One particular memory was meeting my dear friend, Wayne Yentis. I met Wayne 25 years ago in the hang gliding landing zone (LZ). He was a tall lanky man with a twinkle in his eye and was most probably the brightest individual I have ever met. Truly a renaissance man… he was an artist, a photographer, an electrical engineer, a musician, a computer genius, an inventor (of the Clavitar) and a host of other things. He knew more about more than anyone I have ever known. Wayne had a recording studio in his house and was constantly sending me files of music he had written, played, and produced. Beautiful music.
One particular day I was in his studio and we were having a beer…or two…or many… and I got this goofy idea to take Karaoke music and substitute hang gliding lyrics. It was utterly silly stuff that made no sense to anyone other than another hang glider pilot but in our compromised condition, it seemed a marvelous plan.
I said to Wayne “How about “I got VG?” as I sang the tune of “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher. He beer giggled.
For non-hanglider pilots, VG stands for “Variable Geometry” and refers to a string a hang glider pilot can pull that changes the shape of the wing in flight.
Then I started singing “On the Road Again” just like Willie Nelson, except I sang “In the Air Again.”
More beer giggles as Wayne recorded and mixed it.
The following week, I played one of our recordings for a fellow pilot who unwittingly believed we were serious and asked for a copy of it! Nothing feeds a gag like having an audience so I drove back to Wayne’s house with more beer, more Karaoke, and more silly lyrics. We recorded 15 songs, 12 of which made our cut onto the “Pelican Tunes” CD. When word got out, the local pilots bought them like hotcakes, then the Editor of Hang Gliding Magazine somehow got his paws on a CD and gave it a rave review in the international magazine! We were amused that pilots enjoyed the absurdity and got the jokes. Orders started coming in and we sold this CD all over the world. That was over 7 years ago.
Today after about an hour of flight, I touched down and chatted with the guys in the LZ, when one of them mentioned “Pelican Tunes” had been used in a video of the European Hang Gliding Championships. I was shocked to say the least. SO…I did what any irresponsible gag writer would do, I Googled it…and wow….there it was…
I seriously considered doing “Pelican Tunes 2″ but Wayne Yentis passed away this Wednesday January 23rd, and with the passing of my partner in crime, my motivation is gone. The lyrics in my desk drawer will have to collect dust as the ink fades.
But have a beer and enjoy our goofy time together on YouTube.
I have been a professional photographer in Los Angeles for 35 years. The thing I hear most when actors come to my studio is, “I just want a photo that really captures ME and who I really am!”
While this may sound good, it tells me there is a very basic lack of understanding of how this business works and how to carry out a strong marketing strategy. As harsh as it may sound, not ONE casting director in all of LA concerns themselves with who you really are. It is their job to CAST you not analyze you.
If you are a 30 year old female, you will get “Mom” roles, business women, nurses, a wife, or a host of other characters seen on TV and in movies. It doesn’t matter if you REALLY ARE a Mom or not…that’s why it’s called ACTING. If you are a curvy girl, don’t shoot sexy photos because you’ll get called in for an audition and find yourself in a room full of skinny models. Conversely, if you are a lovely young woman and you have a nice figure, understand that this is a business driven by money. What sells on TV and in movies is sex and violence. So make sure you have a sexy head shot.
Danny DeVito is a sexy leading man to Rhea Perlman because she is married to him, but it is not his casting. While “type casting” may not be right or fair, it is what it is. Get used to it.
Research, research, research to find the right photographer. The guy in your acting class who has a camera and will do your headshots for free or for fifty bucks is NOT a working professional. An actor who does head shots on the side is NOT a working professional photographer and if he has an audition the day of your shoot – you will be out of luck.
If you want this to be your career – invest in it. Go to a professional photographer. Look for someone with a studio (who can shoot natural light OR studio light), who has been in business for 10 years or more, who has a GOOD web site.
GO SEE THEM! Don’t go to someone who shoots out of their apartment. Simply put, go to a pro. Beware of Agents or managers who INSIST you go to their photographer. An Agent should give you a list of known working pro photographers that you can choose from.Get plenty of sleep the night before your shoot. Don’t get involved in an argument with your significant other.
Don’t bring “a friend” to your photo shoot. Don’t bring your family or Mother or your dog. This is YOUR day. Most of all… ENJOY your photo shoot. I often hear actors say how much they “hate having their photos taken”. This is your career…learn to love it. ALL of it. Taking headshots is an acting job just like any other acting job.
If someone tries to tell you “film is better than digital”, just walk away. You should expect to shoot, look at the photos on a computer, get them retouched, and have them burned onto a CD, and walk out with them done all in the same day.
Basically, it is a business. If you treat your acting career like a business, you will have a much greater chance of success!
A final word on Minamisanriku, then on to Fukushima.
There was one building I really wanted to shoot when we went to Minamisanriku. It was the place where Miki Endo worked. She was a lovely vibrant 24 year old newly wed who worked at the Minamisanriku Disaster Response headquarters. It was her responsibility to announce the warning of an approaching tsunami.
“Tsunami warning, get to higher ground”, she repeated over and over again. In many of the videos from that fateful day, you can hear her voice echoing through the town as water rushed in and swallowed everything in it’s path. She was on the second floor of the building. Thirty people worked there and when the tsunami came they all rushed higher and higher but Miki stayed at her post issuing warnings until the very last second in an effort to save as many lives as possible. Along with others, she hurried to the roof, but the raging tsunami ripped the skin off the building and gutted it, taking everything and everyone inside, and then it rose even higher. Among the people working in that building was the Mayor of Minamisanriku. Nine people made it to the roof pushing their Mayor ahead of them…but still the tsunami rose higher. They climbed a radio antenna and clung to life while just inches beneath their feet all the places knew and people they loved disappeared beneath the roaring torrent.
Nine people will never forget that day, suspended above the furious tsunami, clinging to fragile life while 21 of their friends and coworkers, including Miki Endo, were devoured in the deluge.
This is a composite photo of the building where Miki and 29 others, worked. The top frame is as it was, the center frames show the Mayor and 8 others hanging on for the lives while the entire building is devoured, then the water begins to recede. The bottom frame, I shot, and you can see MUCH of the debris has been bulldozed away. Initially, people wanted to make the building a memorial to Miki and the tsunami victims, but her parents (who were saved by their daughters warnings), could not bear to pass by it and asked for it to be demolished.
Miki Endo’s body was recovered in April.
When we left the hotel at Minamisanriku, 3 attendants rushed out with a 10 foot long banner that said “Thank you for coming!” and then they bowed graciously as our bus pulled away. It was raining.
It was a couple of hours bus ride back to Sendai to catch a train to Fukushima. On the bus my gf got a call and turned to me,”Wanna do a shoot in Sendai!?”
Me,”Huh? Uh….OK!”
Sometimes I think she knows every single person in Japan. Someone heard we were there and knew my work. This guy SHU CHIBA represented a Taiko Drum group. This particular group has been traveling a lot doing fund raisers for the earthquake/tsunami victims. They wanted to shoot at this particular shrine in Sendai that is the grave site of Date Masamune who was the founder of Sendai. If you Google him, it’s a fun read.
Hauling all my gear and a packed suitcase, we caught a bus for a half hour bumpy ride, then walked another 6 blocks to the entrance of the shrine. When we arrived at the shrine we rounded a corner and stopped dead in our tracks, staring at 650 million wet and slippery stone steps. “Awww…. I can’t do this” my gf whined.
“YOU got us into this, so come on…they wanna shoot up there…so let’s go!” I grumbled
When we got to the top we were sweating in the chilly drizzle. There was a kiosk where the band and their rep were hiding out, so we all exchanged greetings and headed out to our shooting location. Much to our horror, we rounded a corner and came face to face with another set of 650 million wet and slippery stone steps.
I glared at my gf but couldn’t be irritated because she looked like a soaked kitty and she was just standing transfixed staring glassy eyed at the steps. If misery does indeed love company, it didn’t seem to exhibit itself that day. Even the Taiko Band made jokes about their location choice. But fortunately, there was a nice location at the top where we could shoot and they could be out of the rain. Unfortunately, yours truly, had to stand in the drizzle and try to get a good shot in between tourists walking through the backgrounds of my shots.
We took a taxi back to the station, caught a train for Fukushima, and watched out the window as the clouds parted in time for a lovely sunset.
Yet another bar in Fukushima. More sake tasting. More staggering back to our room…well, I staggered… my gf can put me under the table SOOOO easily. Whatever.
We are upwind and on the opposite side of the mountain range that separates Kitikata from the nuclear reactors that blew. There is less radiation here than there is in Tokyo but just the NAME ‘Fukushima” stops people in their tracks, so the economy in this area is suffering horribly. It’s so sad because the crops here are fantastic but are virtually unmarketable.
At 6 AM we received a wake up call from Mom Nature… an earthquake. I’m a kind of twisted sort – I LIKE earthquakes. Only one made me nervous and that one was the 6.7 Northridge earthquake of 1994. I lived 10 miles from the epicenter. So the Fukushima quake was kinda fun but a solemn reminder of all we had so recently seen and experienced.
We took a nice tour of the city with a local guide and he overwhelmed us with tons of information about this 1500 year old city. Many of the buildings have double roofs for insulation. Fukushima is known for it’s roof tiles, brick, soy sauce, and of course, the local sake. So, of course, part of our tour was, yet again, another sake brewery. Geeez… Japan was beating me to death… I finished the tour in a daze after sampling all the local brews.
I would like to pause for a brief second and say one thing. Of ALL the MANY and PLETHORA things I love about Japan and it’s culture… what the hell is it with their TOILET PAPER!!!! It’s so thin you can almost see through it and you have to be careful not to get a paper cut. OK…it’s not THAT bad but GEEEEZ PEOPLE… you have complicated electronic toilets but ya can’t get the paper right!??? WTF??? OK…rant over.
Now…I feel better…so back to my story. We were driven around the city by the owner of the local sake brewery YAMATOKAWA (don’t ask me how my gf knew HIM – she seems to know everyone on Earth) and we stopped at a town center where a small gathering of locals were celebrating a low key version of harvest festival. They invited all five of us to have lunch with them (by this time we had been joined by my friend Jim Beaver and his guide, Kazumi) so we sat down to a HUGE spread of marvelous marvelous food. My girlfriend’s ancestors are from this area, so as we spoke with the locals, they connected the dots and several of them, it turns out, actually knew her grandmother. “She was a good Doctor” one guy said nodding approvingly. But then… “She was a drunk…. and she touched me!” said his friend.
Maybe it was the sake but I’m pretty sure that was one of the funniest things ever uttered by a human being. The timing couldn’t have been better.
In her defense, my girlfriend’s Grandma WAS a good doctor and was VERY aware that the locals often didn’t have the money to pay her. So they brought her food, housewares, and of course, SAKE! Being Japanese, she HAD to drink it so as not to offend. It also came to light that her “touching” was chest tapping done during an examination. But…even so, it was hysterically funny and delivered ever so perfectly by an eight hundred and thirty five year old wrinkled little Japanese man. Classic.
From the celebration we drove over to a property still owned by my girlfriend’s family. I had visions of fixing up the house there and turning it into a Bed and Breakfast and getting out of Los Angeles… going somewhere that I can’t actually see and taste the air.
We boarded a train and headed for Tokyo, our heads spinning with 11 days of madness. More than once on this trip, I had asked where we were.
Back at the Tokyo Hilton we picked up a few bags we had stored and headed for Narita Airport. We passed, I kid you not, a hotel named “First Wood”… then “Hotel Slit”… then “Hotel Rainbow”. I guess some things just don’t translate.
My friend Jim speaks a bit of Japanese so he did his best to leave a good impression. As he was getting off the bus, he MEANT to say,”Thank you for driving us”… but he attempted to use past tense and failed. What came out was, basically, “Thank you for driving us… NOT!”
We are STILL laughing WITH him over that.
I stopped in one of the tourist trap shops to buy a pen before we boarded and was a bit undecided. My gf handed one to me and said “this one!”. I guess I must have looked at her quizzically because she snapped,”Hey, I’m Japanese, I know more about pens and toilets than you do!”
I bought the pen… and by the way…she was right.
On board the plane I watched the little monitor’s trace of our flight path over the ocean. I didn’t want to leave that beautiful charming land. I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend EVERYONE visit Japan. It fits the bill for something John Muir once said, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread…places to play in and pray in…”.
A little more on Minamisanriku before I move on. It is impossible to describe what I saw there. Standing in the middle of such mass destruction is overwhelming to the point you just go numb. More than anything, what I felt was confusion. My mind could not comprehend houses in this place, I couldn’t hear children playing, smell food cooking, or touch the texture of a building… it was all scraped clean down to nothing but concrete slabs.
We had hired a cab driver to take us around. It felt invasive so we asked the cabbie if it was OK. Not only was he OK with me taking photos, he knew all the best spots because he had shuffled many people from the press to various locations. He told us that his Father in law was in the hospital when the earthquake hit, so the nurses took him up to the third floor where they thought they’d be safe. The tsunami took them all. As we drove into the center of where the town used to be, I just got out and started walking. My gf couldn’t bring herself to even get out of the cab, she was completely heartbroken. This is her home country. I walked through meaningless piles of debris…pipes, shattered wood, chairs, tables, blankets, roof tiles… everything that constitutes a a deconstructed home. They have pushed out roads through the debris and made piles 50 feet high and half a mile long. Pile after pile. A few buildings still stand but are completely gutted and stand soulless like skeletons on a movie set. Because the scale of things was so massive, I was a bit uncomfortable for not having a stronger emotional reaction, until I saw a little girl’s shoe. I lost it. I could hear her laughter, see her smiling little face, and could not bear to think what her final moments might have been like. I read once about a photo journalist who was covering the starvation in Africa, when asked how he dealt with the horror of what he was seeing, he said,”I am doing all I can to help. Maybe my photos will make a difference, but every now and then I just have to put my camera down and weep!” So it was for me, I shot til I couldn’t see through the lens, then I’d take a small break and just sit and look. I still can’t get it through my head. The day of the destruction, our cab driver had dropped off a fare and was headed back into town when he looked up and saw the tsunami coming right at him. He slammed it into reverse and backed up as fast as he dared. He got away and drove over a hill. There were cars everywhere from people evacuating, so he just left his car where it was and started running back to town. He knew of a hiking trail through the woods, so he hiked all night, and when he broke through the forest the next morning, all he had known was gone. He couldn’t find his house, his neighbors, or his loved ones. His family, with only the exception of his Father in law, had escaped but it still took him two days to find them.
Some people had raced to the top of a hill where there was an old folks home miles from the ocean shoreline. They thought they were safe but tsunami took them all.
As I walked around that shell of a building, there were gurneys and wheelchairs twisted into death sculptures. A soccer ball with a kids name written on it sat on a window sill, carried up from the town below. Inside there were big piles of debris. One thing that caught my eye was a paper with hand prints on it. It was the kind a kid makes when they dip their hand in paint and then make a print on a piece of paper, then sign it as a gift to an elder. I had visions of an old lady cherishing the hand print of her grand daughter until the ocean came for her. Time to set the camera down again.
Our driver took us back down closer to the water where a new fishery building has already been erected. It’s a huge structure right in the midst of all this destruction. There was a salmon run going on during the time we were there and that is a large part of what used to be Minamisanriku’s livelihood, so there were the fishermen, back to work, doing what they have done for years and years. I watched as Salmon came en mass up the river to spawn and die. I’ve seen lots of Salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest but this was different because it was here, in this place, in the river than runs through the destruction. Dead Salmon littered the river banks and took on a whole new and deeper metaphorical meaning. Perhaps it is as simple as a “cycle of life” vision but somehow it all goes mad when mankind gets involved.
The town will be rebuilt but this time up on the surrounding hills while only a few boats in the harbor and a few buildings that HAVE to be near it, will venture there again. Some of the fish farms in the bay have been reconstructed and I saw fishermen motoring here and there in what must be numb routine.
As I stood up on a boat that had been torn in half, I shot photos of the fishermen going about their duties. I failed to look where I was going and stepped off the boat onto a nail, and drove it through my shoe. The nail stabbed through the rubber of my tennis shoe and luckily went right between my toes without even a scratch. I climbed the rest of the way down, looked at it, stepped on the back side of the board the nail was in and pried my foot loose. I shrugged,”Whatever”… and kept shooting. I honestly believe had it driven through the dead center of my foot I might have had the same reaction. It was a perspective check. After all, what is a stupid little nail wound in a place like this?
A young man we met is in charge of the first festival in Minamisanriku since the tsunami. We met with him and his business partner in the Hotel Kanyo where we stayed. As we sat in this luxurious place, amusingly named “Blue Line Tea Rounge” (yep they spelled it with an “r”), we asked uncomfortably if there was any way we could help. “Just let people know”, he said. The Japanese are unaccustomed to asking for help but give it graciously and abundantly when a need arises.
There is a custom on New Years in Japan where children are given decorated envelopes of money from relatives and friends. It’s called ”Otoshidama”. A while before we left for Japan, my gf came up with the idea to give as many envelopes as we could to the children of Minamisanriku. Her idea was to put a $5 American bill in each envelope with a paper listing all those who donated. While it isn’t a great deal of money for each child, it is the idea that someone in America is thinking about them and that those people do care, that means more. The 5 buck bill is worth more in metaphor than in reality… especially given the exchange rate. I suspect the children in Minamisanriku will keep those bills for many years.
My gf handed them over $3000. in Otoshidama envelopes. The young man and his business partner got teary eyed and literally sat and stared at us not knowing what to say or how to say it.
Money had come in to the area through the Red Cross and other agencies but very very little of it had been distributed even all these months later. But here in this room there was a direct gift from a few in the US to them, with no strings, no red tape, and 100% going to the children. I was happy to be part of it.
We slept that night uncomfortably comfortable with images in our heads of hope amidst devastation, peace in the middle of chaos, and people resuming their lives surrounded by shattered pieces of what it used to be.
Tomorrow we are off to Fukushima. The dead nuclear power plant is on the other side of the mountain from where we will be.
It has started to rain.
My cheek hurt … it’s hard to get the bubble going, but once you do, then it gets easier.
We took a taxi back to the station, caught a train for Fukushima, and watched out the window as the clouds parted in time for a lovely sunset.
Because the scale of things was so massive, I was a bit uncomfortable for not having a stronger emotional reaction, until I saw a little girl’s shoe. I lost it. I could hear her laughter, see her smiling little face, and could not bear to think what her final moments might have been like. I read once about a photo journalist who was covering the starvation in Africa, when asked how he dealt with the horror of what he was seeing, he said,”I am doing all I can to help. Maybe my photos will make a difference, but every now and then I just have to put my camera down and weep!” So it was for me, I shot til I couldn’t see through the lens, then I’d take a small break and just sit and look. I still can’t get it through my head.
The day of the destruction, our cab driver had dropped off a fare and was headed back into town when he looked up and saw the tsunami coming right at him. He slammed it into reverse and backed up as fast as he dared. He got away and drove over a hill. There were cars everywhere from people evacuating, so he just left his car where it was and started running back to town. He knew of a hiking trail through the woods, so he hiked all night, and when he broke through the forest the next morning, all he had known was gone. He couldn’t find his house, his neighbors, or his loved ones. His family, with only the exception of his Father in law, had escaped but it still took him two days to find them.
