Kevin Foley: Digital Pioneer
“You’d think actors would be comfortable in front of the camera, but they’re notoriously nervous,” says veteran photographer Kevin Foley, whose global roster includes clients such as Debra Messing, Anthony Hopkins, Brooke Shields, Morgan Freeman and companies like NBC and Warner Brothers.
“Actors spend their whole lives in front of a motion camera where their personality and acting skills can come out,” Foley explains. “With still images, a fraction of a second is captured on film, and that’s going to sit on the cover of a magazine for the next 45 days. They have to live with that moment.”
Switching to Mac-based digital photography — at a time when only a few people knew anything about digital photography — has made all the difference for Foley. In front of his camera, actors are more likely to chill than to freeze.
“Let’s Order Lunch”
“In the past, when I was shooting film, you never showed the actor the first Polaroid,” Foley says. “I’d always shoot off two or three Polaroids before the first one had even developed. The set could have been lit beautifully, but if you shoot someone in between expressions, they think, ‘That’s what I’m going to look like for the next 200 frames.’ Their confidence drops. Your work is judged on that one Polaroid.”
Shooting digitally has the inverse effect, Foley says. “With digital, I rattle off 10 or 15 frames and have my assistant quickly adjust lights. By the fifteenth frame, the actor is warmed up a little and I’ve probably got two or three good images.”
Foley says when he shows his clients early digital shots, “their confidence is boosted. They’re happy to be there. They may have originally scheduled the shoot for one hour, but the next thing you know they’re there for four hours. They’re having fun. They say, ‘Hey, let’s order lunch.’
“It was my biggest breakthrough, just helping clients relax by showing them images on the back of the camera as I was shooting them,” Foley says
“What Have I Done?”
It’s easy to call almost any photographer who picks up a digital camera a “digital pioneer” — after all, digital photography is a relatively young technology — but Foley owns the tag.
“When I heard about the idea of digital photography, I was like, ‘Oh man, this would be a great thing. I could save money on film and processing. I could see the images right away. I wouldn’t have to scan them. Now I can retouch everything instead of the one image I think is going to be in my portfolio.’”
At the time, in the early nineties, Foley fit into a very small niche of photographers who were young enough to know computers and successful enough to afford a digital camera. He’d been using the Mac for five or six years, scanning slides and using Quark to layout his promotional pieces, so he was already comfortable working digitally.
Foley’s first camera — a two-megapixel Canon — ran just under $20,000 (batteries and drives not included). He drained his bank account to make the move to digital photography, yet didn’t have a single client who was ready to shoot digital. “I had a few sleepless nights, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’” Foley confesses.
Selling Digital
To make the transition, Foley started shooting a few shots for his portfolio on the digital camera and encouraged clients to try a few shots digitally, appealing to their wallets by lowering lab fees.
“Once I had enough digital images in my portfolio,” Foley says, “I would tell clients that half of the images were shot digitally. They would either say ‘What’s that?’ or ‘No way.’ Then they would go through my portfolio again and try to figure out which shots were digital and which ones weren’t. Inevitably, they couldn’t tell — at that point I had them sold.
