I was brought on to do a cover shoot with actor Billy Bob Thornton.  Generally speaking, the bigger the star, the more up-in-the-air everything is.  Shoots can be on and off the schedule a dozen times or more and I don’t think anything of it.

When the day in question came, I arrived at Thornton’s hotel suite to do the shoot and learned that he was in the middle of a press junket.  And running behind.  I don’t know how/why all press junkets run behind, but they do.  And Thornton’s was really behind.  What was supposed to be a leisurely half an hour shoot ended up being about 90 seconds… and that might be overstating it some.

When Thornton’s last interview ended, I told him, “I’m going to do this as quickly as possible, I just need you to focus.”  He smiled and quickly snapped into photo mode.  Since we didn’t have time to set up any kind of back drop, I had a publicist flip over one of the movie posters that was lying around and hold that up behind Thornton’s head to give him a nice, solid white background.  Since I didn’t have time to do a light set up, I had my assistant blast Thornton with an on-camera flash from my back up camera so that he’d be perfectly lit in front, even though I was shooting from the side.  I had him look straight at camera for a few shots and then off to the side to get this image.

And, just like that, we were done.  I got the cover photo and the main photo with the article in about a minute.  That was a pressure filled shoot.