Prep work

There are changes I’m making this year in how I do my shoots, and one of them is prep work. How I prepare and what I do and plan to do will be much different.

For example, tomorrow I have a shoot with a band called Attack Attack. I figured out an idea a couple weeks back that I wanted to try, and I fine tuned it in my head until I knew what I wanted to do. Then I went to my studio and visualized the shot, I imagined how it would look like and how I’d light it. I researched online things I needed to obtain and purchase to pull this off correctly, and I ordered them. I then had to change my photo idea slightly to accommodate what I wanted to do. 

It’s going to be like a skydiving shot. Initially, I wanted a parachute in the shot. Six band members, one parachute, and a plane flying off in the distance. I then discovered it was going to be difficult to obtain a parachute at a decent cost, and one that was both small enough and not too small. A shot was then pointed out to me that a photographer had recently done with a band that was enough to want me to keep from doing the same idea. So I’ve now tweaked my shot enough to where it should stand out even to someone who has seen the other shot.

I needed a way to hold up a person in the air, so I bought a fall-arrest harness for that. Then, thanks to the help of fellow Five Giants Studio photographer Nick Brewer, I built something to hang that harness from. You can see it (and Nick) below, we just finished building that a few hours ago. I also bought a pretty decent fan from Lowe’s so that I can get wind going on the band members and at least have the illusion of wind blowing them around.

Tonight I am building the shot that I will place them into. What I need to do is find shots with similar lighting, the sun needs to be at similar angles for it to work. I am going to have the sky and some ground in the shot. Once I piece that together, I can know how I need to light the band. I will need one light to simulate the sun, which means I will leave the standard reflector on it. I might throw a 1/2 or 1/4 CTO gel on it as well to warm the color temp up a little bit. 

This is an example of some of the steps involved in preparing for a shoot. Not all my shoots are like this, but any that involve more complex ideas or building will usually need this and a decent amount of time. 

I will be posting a behind the scenes video from the shoot hopefully within a week, or whenever I get it and the shoot edited. In that video, I will cover more on lighting and possibly editing as well

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