When you live in a smaller town, say 100,000 people, you start to think you have found about every location to shoot. Sometimes I just get in my car and drive around hoping to find some abandoned truck or gutted house that would make an interesting location. On one such trip I found new racquetball courts the city had just built at a new community center. These courts were perfect for a ‘studio’ shot, lots of nice white walls, or creating an interesting sports image. I called in PJ, an athletic model in town, and we were ready to go. Luckily for us we had a great stormy sky building for a good backdrop. I often try to time shoots where the weather looks interesting; plain blue just doesn’t cut it. We did video of behind the scenes on this one, take a peek.
We did two different lighting set ups for this image. The first shot was an action image of PJ hitting the ball. Since there was going to be lots of movement, we used Elinchrom Ranger A heads for the fast flash duration. We used a deep Octabank on one head and a standard reflector on the other head, positioning them in a cross lighting set up. The trick was capturing the shot just as PJ hit the ball. We darkened the ambient exposure to add drama to the sky.
The final image, a static portrait, was done using three rangers and one quadra. We used two strip banks on opposite sides of PJ for accent lights, and one deep Octa for our main light. We also added a little kicker light with the quadra with a standard reflector on the right. Tech: D3, 24-70mm lens, F11, 1/250, ISO 100.
I recently went to Wyoming with a friend to work on some new stock images. We found a fantastic location in the Medicine Bow Mountains. After shooting some available light images of Steve boulder hopping, I knew the image needed some light to spice it up.
We used two Elinchrom Rangers and one Quadra to light the shot. We used the standard reflectors, no grids or softboxes. This maintains the specular edgy look. The trick with this hard edged light is feathering the light so it doesn’t spill and overexposre the white rocks. To accomplish this we aimed the reflectors very high, almost up at the sky. It doesn’t even look like the lights are aimed at the subject. But as long as the bottom edge of the reflector is aimed at the model you will get light. In post production we darkened the sky and added a little Lucis Art. Tech: Nikon D3, 24-70mm, f11 at 1/200, ISO100.
Always fun to see my images in print, especially when it is an advertisement. Look for this ad in photo magazines, this one was in Digital Photo Pro Magazine. If you want to see how this image was done, check out the earlier blog post and video of behind the scenes. Thanks go out to Mark Astmann and the design team for coming up with this concept!
Had a great holiday weekend camping and climbing with friends in Penitente Canyon recently. Penitente Canyon is an incredible place to rock climb, a magical canyon with rock buttresses and….rattlesnakes, lots of rattlesnakes. We had 6 young kids in our group, and almost every trip down the trail resulted in a rattlesnake sighting. I had no problem avoiding snakes on the trail, after all, it is their canyon. But I had to draw the line when one showed up in camp.
