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VIDEO TUTORIALS BXRI, Elinchrom, fashion, flash, how to, lighting, LIVE TRAINING, model, on location, Photoshooting, SETUP TUTORIALS, shooting, strobes, STUDIO, VIDEO

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VIDEO TUTORIALS BXRI, flash, lighting, LIVE TRAINING, mode, model, photography, PORTRAIT, SETUP, SETUP TUTORIALS, shooting, TUTORIAL, TUTORIALS, VIDEO

Hey guys, finally it is time for another long awaited SETUP-HOW-TO-TUTORIAL about one of our action-poster shootings. Last summer, we did a shoot in an American Diner. Again, we had a whole SWAT Reanactment Team with us, we had over 8 models but only one make-up artist. But that wasn’t the problem because most of the models were wearing masks during the shooting.

This post is going to be a REALLLLLLYYYYY BIG AANND LOOOOOOONG SETUP TUTORIAL.

But first of all, take a good look at the final result. :-)

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Ok, the question is: HOW DID WE DO THAT? The answer: IN ONE PHOTO :-). Everything you see was taken with only one shot. The whole lighting was arranged for the one shot. Ok, there were two little things digitally retouched. But later more about that topic.

• PLANING

Planing is absolutly essential for such a big projekt. All persons involved needs to be instructed. Also, make clear what everyone has to do. So take your time and make sure everybody knows (and when I say everybody I mean everybody) that all this effort is made only for one shot in that whole night. :-)

Keep in mind, that if you change one person’s dress during the shooting, all of the other persons will have to wait. So, whatever you can arrange before the shooting starts, arrange it, everybody will love you for that!

We also tried to get everything into position. Every little detail was where it belonged. Start with arranging the picture in your head, then is easier to know were everything needs to be placed.

• STAY-AWAKE-GEAR

It sounds kind of funny and not really connected to photography. But have you ever seen a good photo of a bored, tired or hungry model??? I haven’t… :-)

• CAMERA-SETUP

Once you have finished all the pre-shooting-work, you are good to go ahead with the planning the actual photo. You should always take your time to find the PERFECT camera position. We were shooting from a tripod to get the possibility to do the same picture over and over again. The disadvantage of a tripod is, that you are not very mobile. Once you have found a spot, you will certainly stay there for a very long time :-)… One more reason to look for the perfect postion:  the photo lives with the position. Good or bad… what you miss with the first arrangement, you can’t compensate with e.g. a good lighting.

I can’t tell you whose feet you are looking at… but they don’t belong to one of our team members :-)…

Above you see, that we were using ELINCHROM RANGER to light the scene. We used 3 of them, giving a total of 3300 Ws of power. But that still wasn’t enought. We used a whole lot of normal studio strobes up to 1000Ws. In total we had nearly 10000Ws on the scene. Just enought to light it properly… as few as possible but as many as neccessary.

But first things first. The lighting???? What did we do???? Let’s get to the actual setup-tutorial.

• LIGHTING PLANING

Here you see the blueprint of the diner. I hope you get the point. :-) I know I am not Michel D’Angelo :-)… But it should be good for the moment.
We wanted to have the counter, the actual bar, on the picture. You can see the position of the camera on the images above. We used a wideangle lense (16mm 2.8) and ended up with nearly the whole diner in one picture. That was good for the image, but very bad for setting up the strobes. :-)

The overall aim was to get very harsh separating lights from behind. Every person on the image should be losend from the background by some highlights.

Ok, but first of all, we needed to have a basic lighting over the whole scenery. Take a good look at the blueprint above. Yu can see that the camera is one side of the diner. There is a distance of about 7 meters to the other side of the room. The loss of flashpower over the distance would make the other side of the room completely dark. The closest person to the camera would be about 1 meter away, the farest would be about 7 meters. That makes a difference of 6 f-stops. You double the distance, you only get a quarter of total power. Double distance makes 2 f-stops. :-)… That makes the image pretty dark :-)…

But we had to start with a specific lighting. So the best idea was to put the biggest lightsources close to the camera.

The next stop was to take care of the dark side of the room. Take a look at the next drawing. See how we solved the problem.

We used two more Ranger strobes.

1. The first Elinchrom Ranger was used to light the complete background of the image. We used an indirect lighting solution. We aimed at the sealing of the room and used the sealing as a big light source. SOFTBOX BABY… :-)
   –> At the beginning we talked about a small retouching. Can you imagine the brightness of the sealing when you use it as a softbox. It is very bright… and you won’t see textures or forms. So we did a “normal shot” of about 2 seconds to get a new and perfect layer for the digital work.
2. The next step was to light up the middle of the diner. We had no really big softbox with us. So we did a little improvising. A California Sunbounce Swatter PRO was stick to the window and we lightened the swatter with a simple reflector. Biggest softbox ever… :-)

Now we had a nice and very flawless lighting of the whole scenery. But still not close enough to the final lighting. The highlights were still missing.

Highlights are the most important things to get depth and contrast. Without the proper highlights and highlight strobes, the whole scene would rather be an undistinguishable mess of persons than anything else.

1. We used the counter/kitchen to set up another strobe to light the back of the bar and give all the gangsters on the counter a nice light from behind.
2. A lot of small on-camera-flashes were used to light the single persons or groups.
3. Small hint is to use the obsticals in the photo to hide those little flashes. This way, you get the light INTO your photo without showing the flashes.

• SPECIAL TRICKS

Ok, that’s it with the lighting hints. Let’s pay some attention to some specials.

–> Most of the time we are using “TETHERED SHOOTING”… the laptop is always connected to the camera and every photo is directly transfered to the harddisk.
This way you can see every single photo on you big laptop screen. Good to find little errors and mistakes.

–> We are using tape to cover the image to crop every image coming from the camera to the laptop.

• TRY, TRY, TRY AND TRY AGAIN

I don’t have to tell you, right? You have to try and try again to get the final result. You can imagine that it is not the simplest thing to get the looks and positions of 8 or more persons correct on one photo. There is always one little “a…” who ruins the picture. :-) But at the end of the day you have to live with that.

One more information. I know I am currently writing a SETUP-post. I do not forget that. But there is one important factor that I did not yet mention: the time factor. Here is the deal. We started the shooting at about 10 pm and down below you can see the time, when we finally found the time to go to Mc Donalds for the first and last MORNING COFFEE. The whole shooting took us about 8 hours… :-) constant work…just for one picture…

But it was worth the trouble. Take a look at some details. But keep in mind that we took that picture with a Canon 5D with 16MP and you are looking at crops of more than 1:1… :-) Enjoy the scenery… and have a good night or morning or whatsoever… :-) BYE

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Have you already seen the great retouching-work? It was again retouched by CALVIN HOLLYWOOD. For his portfolio he made a slightly other version. Take at look at HIS HOMEPAGE!

SETUP TUTORIALS BXRI, flash, how to, lighting, on location, Photoshooting, Poster, Ranger, retouching., SETUP TUTORIALS, strobes

Hello fellows…
today, the setup tutorial is going to be a bit more complicated than normal :-)… but the result is worth the thinking :-). Ok, whats the image?

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I have to state that the photo was not completly our own work. The digital work was done by CALVIN HOLLYWOOD, a german photoshop professional. Having read the titel of this post, you have clearly already gotten the point. We did needed a lot of flash power for that image and we used every single flash we could find, still not having enough strobes :-)…

There were 11! flashes used for this image and the total scene was photographed at one time. So no composing work at all. Because 11 strobes are a lot of light sources, we have to explain the whole setting step-by-step. It is best if you just open the final image in a new browser window and constantly check the information given with your image. This way, you can follow the explanations easily.

First of all, lets have a look at a photo showing the whole scene and finding the flashes! They have been marked with red circles because of the small size of the image. The small on-camera fashes are sometimes hidden behind the couch or some tables. So don’t be puzzled if you see a red marker without seeing the flash on the image! We did use about 4 small on-camera-flashes (SB-800, SB-28 and 580EX) to be able to set strobes in hidden places. Small light sources, completly free placeable but still strong enough to expose a f16.

Ok, let’s go through it very carefully.

1. YELLOW = MAIN LIGHTS – Two 135cm softboxes at 1100Ws.
2. PINK = HIGHLIGHT – One 135cm Striplight at 500Ws without diffusion layers, big enough to also light the background.
3. RED = HIGHLIGHT – One Maxi Light Reflector at about 500Ws. Very strong mirrored light source. Fired through the plants.
4. BLUE = SHADOW-KILLER – One snoot at about 400Ws to eliminate the lack of lighting on the faces of the persons sitting on the couch.

Those flashes were the basic flash setup. The following strobes gave the aditional little “edgyness”…

1. CYAN = MORE HIGHLIGHTS ON THE DARK UNIFORM OF THE POLICEMAN.
2. GREEN = HIGHLIGHTS ON THE PLANTS TO FORM A BARRIER AND TO NARROW THE SCENE. A BIG STRIPLIGHT LYING ON THE FLOOR.
3. ORANGE = MORE HIGHLIGHTS ON THE PERSONS SITTING ON THE COACH
4. MAGENTA = HIGHLIGHTS ON THE POLICEMEN AND THE BODYGUARD OF THE CRIMEBOSS.
5. YELLOWGREEN = LIGHTING ON THE BACKGROUND TO GET MORE DETAIL.

Camera settings were:  f14, 1/160s, ISO100, 18mm on 35mm canon digital camera 5D, 17-40mm.

Now take a look at the images down below. You see the single flashes and the areas to be lit by those flashes.

And to really let you look behind the scenes, we also want to show you another photo without any retouching. It’s the cropped RAW file with some levels! You see, we tried to switch positions of the “actors”, tried out different outfits and moods… A lot of times it is about trying things out, optimizing your work.

There are two important things when taking photos like those.

• Arranging lightsources: Most important is, that you know the final look of your image. For the “Dave-Hill“-Style you do need a lot of highlights, minimal darks and still a good contrast. Very often, the elimination of darks is achieved with a additional ring flash. But it is enough to have a soft lightsource close to the camera. Have a look how many flashes in this photo were just highlighting the edges of the sc
• Arranging actors and elements in the final photo: We can’t help you with that topic. Do as you want to…

You see, the photo already got this artificial lighting but it has not the cool comic style. It is still to clean and to realistic. From this point, it was up to CALVIN HOLLYWOOD!

For the whole shoot, we took about 7-8 hours. Lighting and setting up the location was about 3 hours of work. Bevor that, there was not one photo taken. But try to make those hard “cuts” during your shoots. After the setup was finished, we used every single cell in our brains for CREATIVITY. Lighting was done and no thought was wasted… We can promise you better results when you try to split your photoshoot in two. Concentrate on lighting and after that, totally contrentrate on your photography. Very often, even when your lighting is not the good, you can make the best photos looking for the style and the personality of your model. But thats another topic…

Here you go with some detailed shots out of the resulting photo. Some close-ups for that you can see what the digital retouching made.

And finally we end with some other impressions of the photoshoot. We do love MAKING-OF and BEHIND THE SCENES shots. :-) Big thanks also go the NACHTRESIDENZ, the finest club in Düsseldorf for the help with the location!

… and finally finally we also want to show you a small but cool video about the shoot. No real “photo-how-to” but still very fun to watch. Look out for the gorgeous man with the vibe in his blood… DANCE BABY… DANCE!!!

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