Band shoot

"The making of..."

About a week ago a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to do a photo shoot for a metal band together with him. Of course I thought this was a very cool idea, so yesterday evening I packed my gear and we went to shoot some cool images of "Born Of Flames".

 

(The photo's shown in this blog are not (yet) edited)

First we shot some photo's of the complete band outdoors. I used a remote triggered Canon Speedlight 430 EXII with a shoot-through umbrella for this. It was still pretty bright outside but I wanted to make some darker looking photo's. To achieve this I used the manual mode and dialed in a low ISO value and a high aperture value. The shutter speed was 1/200 as this is the speedlights synch speed.

 

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 23mm

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 21mm

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 18mm

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 27mm, used reflector on front man to create fill light

After the outdoor session we shot some "action-shots" inside. Here we used some studio flashes with a snoot  (drummer) and gold-reflection umbrella's which were positioned at a low angle. It was hard to focus these images as the light was very low. The auto-focus system didn't know what to do with it, so I had to use manual focus. But also for the human eye it was hard to see if the image was sharp.

 

f/5 t:1/200 iso:800 46mm

f/4.5 t:1/200 iso:400 42mm

f/5 t:1/200 iso:400 59mm

f/4 t:1/200 iso:800 25mm

f/4 t:1/200 iso:200 33mm

It was pretty cool to do this shoot. It's not every day that you get a band-shoot request for a grunting metal band. For safety, I put some wet tisues in my ears during the action-shots :-)

Flash experiments

External Flash, possibly even harder to use than a DSLR itself, at least if you want correctly lit photo's. Therefore it is wise to experiment with it as much as possible. To perform some experiments, I made a small Do-It-Yourself studio in the garage. For now, let's call it 'Studio Le Garage' :-)

Studio "Le Garage"

So what can we find in "Le Garage"? Of course we have a nice (cheap :-) ) tripod with the DSLR on top of it. On the right there is the flash on a not-so-professional stand, with on the floor a even less professional diffuser (an Ikea storage box). We also have a reflector (at the foot of the tripod in the photo) which is a piece of white foam board that I found in the back of a painting that we bought years ago (never throw anything away ;-) ) As a background I use a black piece of fabric that I bought for 2 Euro per meter at the market.
The flash is a Canon Speedlite 430EX II that is remotely triggered by the Canon 600D (wireless).

For my saturday morning experiment, I wanted to create some low-key (dark) photo's.

Experment 1

As a first flash experiment I made a self portret. A low key photo with some pretty harsh shadows. The flash was not on full power mode and not diffused. Also, no reflector was used to create fill light.

Experiment 2

For the second experiment, I diffused the flash using the Ikea-storage-box-diffuser. On the other side of my face I used the reflector which I held myself, just outside the frame. As you can see, the shadows are much softer.

Experiment 3

Next experiment: always nice to use a model so that more photo's can be made using different settings and setups. Unfortunately I only made a few photo's when the flash batteries went dead :-) For this photo, the same setup was used as experiment 2.

Experiment 4

This photo was not made in "Le Garage" but in the living room during a bright day! The background (just normal living room stuff) was darkened out by increasing the apperture (f/32) so that hardly any light reaches the sensor. The light that is vissible in the photo is created by the off camera flash. Using this method, low key photo's can be made without having a special dark background, everywhere and every time of the day.