Alan Hald & Jeffrey McKeever
Vice Chairman, Chairman & CEO, Co-founders, Microage
Phoenix, AZ ~ 5:30 PM on 10.6.1995

Regina Jones, Art Director at Inc Magazine assigned me to shoot an interesting portrait of Alan Hald & Jeffrey McKeever for the "Master Entrepreneur of the decade" award... (great, no pressure on me to come up with anything creative... Master Entrepreneur of the decade" this is going to be tough).

I started thinking about the obvious, Microage sells computers and we are located in the desert... let's put those things together... now to convince them of the idea.

I wanted the subjects images on two large monitors in the desert with some nice cactus, mountains, etc... so we shot Alan Hald & Jeffrey McKeever individually (of course the sprinklers went off during the shoot) near their corporate headquarters a few days before we shot the monitors in the desert... We needed time to get the film processed (remember the good old days where it took time to run film). Next, Danny Ruiz, Microage's art director / graphics person had the two head shots scanned and Photoshopped in their logo (I'm not even sure what version of Photoshop was being used in 1995? :-)

Next, I scouted the desert for the perfect location, finding a spot that has all the elements I want, and sent the location directions and a map to Danny for the monitor shot. He brought the two monitors and two hard drives out to the location at the arranged time. We set up the columns and when he arrived, we set up the computer equipment.

We double exposed the 4x5 film, first with the monitors, columns and desert scene, then waited for dark, fired up the computers (running off of a Honda generator) and brought up the screens with the head shots and made the second series of exposures (the double exposure)... of course now with digital we would just put the second exposure in with Photoshop... now, if you'll please excuse me for a moment... my telegraph machine is going off and I need to decipher the message ;-)

Lighting: Dynalite strobe for the people.
Lighting: Available light with fill cards for the desert scene with monitors.
Camera: 4x5, 150mm lens, Film: Fuji RDP II
Exposures: 1/60th @ f/11 (people)
               3 sec @ f/45 (desert)
               20-90 sec. @ f/32-f/45 (screens)
Photo assistant: Lyle Moultrie