How to Pack-Studio Edition

I'm traveling up to Petoskey, Michigan to shoot a fashion job this week. It's pretty straightforward, full length, on white backdrop stuff, but working up in a town that barely has a Radio Shack let alone a real camera store has its challenges as far as gear goes.

And lately, I've been paring down on the amount of stuff I take for any job. One lens instead of three, three lights instead of six, and using a C-stand as a backdrop support-it all saves weight, time, and my assistants back from lifting heavy bags.

But when you have to bring the whole studio with you, it changes your packing list. This is nine bags-light stands, c-stands, video tripod, follow focus rig, six heads in two cases, lenses, bodies and laptops in another two, small modifiers, and then six or so softboxes with assorted speedrings for the two types of lights I use, and 40lbs of sandbags.

This isn't even including the 9' roll of backdrop paper that has to squeeze into my cars 9' 1" main cabin, touching the windshield. 

But what amuses me the most about the setup is where all the bags come from. Most of my gear is as old as my career, some of it was even brought back from my first year of work. The lightstand bag now holds only two c-stands, and a thrift shop golf club bag now holds light stands and grip, including the backdrop kit, tripod and boom arm. It's a rolling case, and probably the heaviest bag to move. 

The pelican case holds two Profoto heads and a 1200 Acute pack ever so nicely, but no room for anything else. A Calumet rolling suitcase holds the four White Lightnings, cords and all the extension cords for the job.

For this job, I'll be shooting some video as well, which means an additional Manfrotto tripod, the backpack with follow focus and all its accessories, and even a Vagabond Lithium battery so I can get extended shooting times without swapping batteries, it just hooks onto the shoulder support and I plug in the camera body and the screen. 

With this setup, you can light anything under the sun, even at high noon. The only thing missing are the two additional Vagabond II batteries that I would take if we actually had to work outside. 

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The Business End

Staring down a few tons of aluminum, steel, electronics and explosives can be an invigorating experience. A few ounces of plastic, glue and paint on the other hand lacks the intimidation factor. However, with some simple lighting and the right camera work, it can be hard to distinguish it from the real deal. 

I started photographing miniatures about five years ago with a little P-51 Mustang I bought online, pre built and painted. It took a few tries, but I turned it into a nice little picture over the english countryside. Something in me wanted to do more models and building, but I never seemed to have the time or the space to do it. 

Once I had the space (dining room tables, entire floors) I started building with an eye towards photographing the results. Which would have been disappointing at first with the glue everywhere, paint peeling off, and decals falling away.

Eventually, I had a fleet of mostly complete, partially well done airplanes from various time periods. None were good enough to photograph the way that first one was, in the full light of day. However, they were not assembled as poorly as they had been painted, and made for an intimidating shape when viewed head on. Trouble is, when your subject is supposed to be 16 feet high, and is actually only five or six inches, perspective comes in.

You need to be low on miniatures, frequently below the surface you're actually shooting on. It makes it a bit harder to get the right proportion of floor visible to apparent height of your camera. When your lens element is about the same size as your subject, something isn't going to fit, and you have to compromise.

However, as demonstrated by the SR-71 here, a smaller lens on a smaller camera lets you split that difference. This was done on my iPhone, held with the lens right above the surface. You get the ground filling in all the way to the lens, and it looks like you're still below a plane only sitting 2 inches off the ground.

But with a real lens on a real camera for real size quality, you can't quite do that. Here my lens is even with the tabletop, minimizing the amount of 'ground' visible to get the right height of the B-25 showing. I could crop down, or move the camera higher to get rid of the bar across the bottom, but I can also spin it as shooting from far enough away with a longer lens. Which is also what it took for some of these. A wide angle lens would be great on a full size plane, but all these were shot with a 70-200 most of the way in.

Photographing miniatures in a convincing manner is something of a bygone technique with the ease that we can strip and place the full size item from a source image. But to get access to these kinds of subjects is an arduous process, let alone to be able to set up any kind of lighting and positioning you want. And it's always fun when people ask if it's the real steel or a model, and even better when they don't ask, and believe the picture outright.



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Working in Detroit

What am I shooting in the middle of the (hot) street with the instagramming audience behind me? Something big, concrete, ferocious, and distinctly a Detroit icon. Check it out after the jump.

Helpouts

I'm very excited to announce that Google selected me to be a participant in a just-launched program called Helpouts, where people can get real time video help from an expert. They contacted me to be one of the photography experts on the site, and asked me to set up a unique Helpout program that revolved around the type of work I do. 

And most of what I do is lighting, which is probably best taught in person, hands on with gear, or at least in tutorial style videos that can be watched at leisure. So I had to change gears a little bit and include the part of my workshops that we don't always get to do in the way I'd like.

Portfolio reviews are important to any photographer, at virtually every stage of their career. Getting feedback from friends and family is a good place to start, but many believe that this sort of help can actually be counterproductive. Of course your mom thinks your work is great. Mine has never had a bad thing to say about even my worst photos.

So I'm glad to share my experiences and give any photographer, from the new-camera-in-box to working professional like myself, a portfolio and marketing critique and review. Any photographer can benefit from a new set of eyes going through their work and offering a different perspective on how it's all presented. I'm hoping the Helpout program will be a part of my workshops in the future for people that need the time for some one-on-one advice.


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Bags and Bags and Bags

After moving home to Detroit a few months ago, I received the expected chorus of 'wait, you LEFT New York to find more work?'

Yes, I left NYC to pursue new clients in my hometown and expand my creativity in ways I felt I couldn't do in the city.

And it's worked, quite well actually. One client that's been listed, but hasn't had a post yet, was worth the entire move alone. And this stunning Gator bag that's been half drawn as though to depict it's original planning stages was a part of it as well.

Most of my work in NYC was E-comm, for The Evolution Store where this guy's siblings may have ended up, and other designers, jewelry makers, restaurants and more. One market I hadn't tapped into yet was a little bit further from home than I expected, but a working vacation is never a bad thing.

It also turns out that leaving NYC was the way to get my work back there. Granted, a line sheet isn't the most glamorous of things, nor will it have my name attached, but it's being shown during Fashion Week to potential buyers.

I worked with a much larger team than I usually do for products (usually just myself) and it was needed. Over 120 bags and accessories in three days of shooting involving an assistant/stylist, two production managers, a graphic designer, and the owner herself with high expectations.

Once we got a system going, and named a few newly minted bags ourselves, this job looked like a drop and pop on the surface, but with the variety of materials used, including python, leather, sheepskin and stingray, we had to tweak lighting every time we changed to a different kind of bag.

While I'd love to take my sweet time on each bag and perfect lighting on each one, I've at least developed a system that looks good on a variety of subjects with as minimal changes as necessary. We even adapted my top-down back to a shoot into table so we wouldn't waste the 15 minutes or so changing tables.

I've also got my magical traveling studio down pat, removing a bunch of stuff that we can easily buy once on location, and bringing just the essentials and irreplaceables. There's no real camera store for over 100 miles, so new 1DMKIV batteries are out of the question.

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Detroit Dirt

Upon my move back to Michigan, I set a goal of acquiring clients that were Detroit specific. If you haven't noticed, Detroit is going through a rough patch right now, but thats when you get in at the ground level, and build the infrastructure and creative resources a city will need. 

Pashon has a similar idea thats even more involved. Detroit Dirt is a food waste management/recycling business that turns your leftovers into someone else's garden patch. Bringing in food from office buildings, hotels, entertainment venues and even the Detroit Zoo, Pashon composts the waste downtown as a service, then sells compost to consumers. 

I met Pashon while photographing for one of her clients at the Cadillac Urban Garden downtown, sponsored by Ideal Group. We set up to do an environmental portrait that could be used for a number of things-versatile imagery. I had already conceptualized this shot before even knowing how the compost yard would look. 

This is how it looked. But bigger. This is the tip of one pile out of dozens that ran about 30 yards long, and over 7 feet high. Sometimes I have to roll around on the ground to get my favorite low angle shots. Not this time, not even an option. It had also just rained the day before, and while the weather had cleared up beautifully, the ground had not. 

Shooting with a single Profoto head into a PCB Parabolic (that took a tumble, snapped, but has since been repaired), I filled in Pashon's front with the light while letting the sun behind her create a nice front rim. Typically, I'd cross light and have the sources from two opposite directions, but this was a bit more natural of a shot and didn't need to have fancy rims and the like.

Dirt (and or the cleverly coined zoo-poo) was obviously the theme for our shots, even though the message of Detroit Dirt is rejuvenating and rebuilding downtown. In the early stages, I like the idea of brushing the dirt off and just getting started. Detroit has a long way to go, and Pashon is here making it happen. I just take the pictures. 

You can find out more about Detroit Dirt and the mission at their site here.

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Single Light Knockout

I've been using Profoto lights for over 5 years now, and I'm still in love with them. It's not that the light itself looks better than my other lights, per se, but I do find myself relegating my other heads to backdrop duty almost exclusively so I can put the Acute kit up front and center. 

Several blog posts have backed up this infatuation, mostly when it comes to using the bare Profoto dome as a modifier itself. Today's shoot required a bit more omph than even the bare light can provide, so we went with a basic reflector on a wide zoom. 

The punch from the light is phenomenal. We had to feather it way down to cover our foreground for other versions of this picture, and we still maintained a huge advantage over the sun that was almost directly in the frame. 

Doing test shots to warm up while the light comes lower.

I've used other lights with their included reflectors, and none of them, with their un-zoomable setups, come close to creating this kind of light. Just need to add more Profoto modifiers to the collection. 

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Announcing...

Yes, I shot my own engagement as it happened. It's hard to surprise your long-term girlfriend when she knows it's coming, but doesn't know exactly how or when. Birthday weekend and vacation coinciding definitely narrowed down the opportunity to just four days, so it took a little planning to keep it a secret till the last second.

Set on manual to expose for most of the sky, and on a tripod with shutter release going at 1//fps, I converted the photos into this .gif as a little way of sharing with our friends and family and clients the good news.
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Jolita Brilliant Shoot

One of my last shoots in NYC was done right in my neighborhood, West Harlem, with life fitness coach and prolific blogger Jolita Brilliant. I wanted to shoot some running as a followup to the work I did while out in Wyoming, which included these sweeping natural landscapes with a tiny runner in them.

A grittier, city-centric shoot came to be, planned around a highway overpass that had minimal traffic underneath, and was well away from areas that are more guarded by overzealous mall cop types.

I went easy on the modifiers, since we were walking to the shoot location. In fact, we ended up walking around 4 or 5 miles back and forth, playing with some different backdrops and lighting that the area had. Our warm up shots against this building were done with a fair amount of natural light creeping in from the river, less than 20 yards away. The metal siding on the building was fun to bounce light around on, and let me sneak a strobe in there while still looking surprisingly natural.

The final list of modifiers was the magnum reflector shown above and...nothing. The bare bulb continues to be a versatile light, especially in mimicking, adding to, or balancing sunlight. And shooting around 5 in the afternoon, we had a lot of sunlight from the west side of the city, right on the river.

We even squeezed in some no-light shots as the sun went down, with some cool shadows coming through the arches of this ironwork overpass. I've finally come to terms with natural light, and while I'll still go to Profoto right off the bat, sometimes you can do a lot with a little, or nothing at all. 

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Damn Ugly Adobe

From Damn Ugly Photography-Brad Trent, whom I assisted while living in NYC, is a blistering indictment of Adobe and it's practices in pricing, licensing, and now delivering via the cloud its software. 

His post nails it on the head as to why we should as photographers and other creatives tell Adobe that we don't want to license our software every month. Since Adobe is by far and away the first choice in photo manipulation, we may be held captive-but only if we slavishly update our software. 

Check out Brad's post and make your voice heard via the We The People and Change.org petition websites. Most importantly, make your dollars heard and spent on other software until Adobe remembers that it serves US as customers. 

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