Istanbul with Dilek Budak

“This summer I was able to travel to Istanbul, Turkey. 3 days of shooting in Turkey with Dilek Budak.” That’s how I put it in my 2012 portfolio. I went over to shoot with the B4L crew, Brothers for Life, through my contact there, Subutay, and the trip started rough: on the way over, all my lights and luggage got messed up, so I never got to shoot with my own equipment. Then I found out the driver they’d given me for the whole trip was a photographer with nicer gear than mine. I caught myself thinking, why’d they bring me? Am I really up to the job?

But we were shooting at Orion, the big studio lot, and they let me walk into the lighting department with a translator and our guys, pick out everything I wanted, tell them what I wanted, and have them build it. On the studio day, while she was in hair and makeup, I set up seven or eight different sets and lighting looks, and we were there about 13 hours. A crazy day.

A couple of those sets were my colorful lighting, some of my first real color work, because with that many setups I went as hard as possible, max power, to make it worth them believing in me and bringing me over. She still uses one of those images as her artist photo today: the purple and blue gels, the plaid shirt, the big glasses.

A day and a half later we drove over the Bosphorus bridge to the Asian side for the next shoot, at a very nice private recording studio I was told Michael Jackson had recorded in. We did photo and video there, plus a few other shoots, and when I left, the team was very happy.

To me it was a team seeing me the way I want people to see me: my skill set, what I do, the breadth of my work. I was so enabled by them to do everything I needed to do that I was able to fly. It was worth it, bringing the overseas photographer.