Hundred Metre Club: Promo shoot2
neil posted in Photos, Neil, phototech, 5Dmk2 on November 2nd, 2010
They are well worth a listen: http://www.myspace.com/thehundredmetreclub/
Shooting a band portrait is a new one for me. I am happy doing lit work and I can light groups, however band photos are another realm of art. There are some rules such as No Brick Walls & No Instruments. However the main aim is to allow the band to carry some message through the photo.
I went about this by not directing the shoot at all. Setting the lights into a safe but interesting configuration and waiting for a moment. John, John, Dean and Hugh were comfortable enough chatting amongst themselves. I made sure they didn’t stray out of the lit zone or form a straight line and waited. I made quite a few frames. Waiting for 4 people to have interesting expressions similtaneously with a 7 second recycle time is a long game and light and patience was slowly falling. To get ‘insurance’ I finished off getting the band to look at me and working through some deliberately goofy poses. The idea being they would settle out of the poses and I would get a second of relaxation in which to shoot.
We then moved to a tighter and more posed arrangement in some rockpools. The wind prevented deploying a soft source as planned so I worked though some arrangements until I found a three light cluster to the right could fake a soft source and some on axis fill gave me some shadow control. The light was fading quickly now and a 1/10th second shutter speed let me put some camera shake blur into the image.