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