Thursday Throwback takes a look back my 1997 Entertainment Weekly shoot of the Bee Gees. My editor at Entertainment Weekly left the concept up to me. After a bit of thought, I pictured the Bothers Gibb in a vault surrounded by gold records. Surely with all their hit records such a room must exist somewhere…

When I spoke with their manager, he swore no such room existed, but he said the guys had a great sense of humor and would be up for anything. So I decided to build it. While I headed to the hardware store for materials to build the set and a gallon of gold paint, my wife and stylist, Fazia, hit the thrift stores, picking up 100 LPs for 50 cents apiece.

After two days of building and painting our set, Barry, Maurice and Robin showed up in wearing all-black as we requested. The moment they saw our set they broke out in laughter and were happy to play along.  I explained that the concept was based on a room that I thought they should have in their homes, they laughed and said, “Yeah, we’ll have to think about that…”

This is one of the many behind-the-scenes stories in “˜Secrets of Great Portrait Photography: Photographs of the Famous and Infamous‘ from New Riders Press. The book draws upon the lessons I’ve learned over the last three decades photographing portraits of the rich and famous. The book blends lavish celebrity portraits of a coffee table book with technical how-to insights with a side dish of behind-the-scenes celebrity stories.

Secrets of Great Portrait Photography takes you though all the stages of a portrait shoot from pre-production planning through posing your portrait through perfecting your shot in post-production. Loaded with details about three decades of portrait photography, each chapter of this 264 page book, is packed full of tips to successful portrait photography sharing all the details of lessons learned from each shoot.

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