I recently put the finishing touches on the Love Amongst Ruin shoot, and as it was one of the more complicated (non-personal work) shoots I've done I thought I'd do a post about how I put it together. Whilst I really like reading all the tech stuff that photographers write about exactly which lights they used and which particular photoshop techniques they like the best, I think I'm in a minority, and that kind of stuff is done to death elsewhere.
Instead I thought I'd just write about the way I organise a shoot like this one, and to show the method behind my way of working. I made decisions before the shoot, that whilst not strictly orthodox, or romantic, meant that I avoided major problems later on and hopefully they might be helpful to someone doing a google search for this kind of geeky thing! I'm hoping this post will not be a level 10 geek fest, but more of a helpful Level 4 nerd out.
Part 1: The Shoot
The brief for this shoot was to get three images of the band, for their publicity team to send out to the press. The shoot was to take place at a huge mansion-like building on Portland Place in central London, where the production team Redbanana would be shooting the music video for the bands first single 'So Sad' throughout the whole day. I'd have two or three windows within the music video schedule to shoot the band while they weren't performing.
From the meetings I'd had with the band and their management team, I had a clear idea of the kind of look they wanted for the final shots. They were after a moody, cinematic style, and for the location to look distressed and degraded. They also needed the images to be punchy, and to have enough colour to appeal to the sub editors at the magazines and websites they were sending them to (they don't like black and white images apparently.)
Taking all these factors into account, I knew it wouldn't be feasible to turn up with my lights, and move around the location with the band, experimenting with different setups, or trying to extract something spontaneous and wild. No matter how nice a person is, if they've been working hard, in a high pressure environment, interspersed with periods of standing around waiting, then chances are its going to be difficult to get them to provide you with multiple, super photogenic, off the cuff moments where every member of the band looks their best.
Because of this I made sure to organise time in each of the areas I liked within the location, so I didn't clash with the video shoot. I'd have time to compose a shot in that location, getting my lighting about right, ready for the band to arrive.
I also made the decision that, rather than trying to get the 'perfect shot', I'd actually shoot in a way that I could later piece the image together in post-production, selecting the best version of each element. As I mentioned earlier, this isn't particularly romantic, and I read interviews all the time where photographers claim they shoot 'to get it all 'in-camera''. On a tight time schedule, with five or six people to shoot, and multiple lights, I doubt this is the case, and they most likely reign things in a lot, and spend a lot of money on retouching. An army of assistants might help, but unfortunately I don't have access to this yet.
This wasn't a time to be experimenting, or doing things to boost my inner photographer ego (its big enough already), and the band and their team were spending a lot of money on the location and equipment etc, so I wasn't going to risk messing up.
Due to my background in retouching, I've seen a lot of good photographers spend a lot of money on getting a badly organised shoot corrected and saved. So with the camera locked off, I made sure I had not only a usable shot of the whole band together, but also shots of each of them alone, from the same angle, in similar, and different poses, to give me options later. Sometimes you can be sure someone looks really good in a particular shot, but then they (or someone else in the team) will turn out to hate the way they look. Such is life!
(above) My 'clean' background plate.
I can't say I managed to extract a plethora of different looks (tight time constraints and malfunctioning flash syncs meant I couldn't quite run the gamut of emotions in each of the band) but I think by the end of post production everyone was reasonably happy with the way they looked in the final shots.
The above are two small sections of images I shot to make sure I had some options of different poses for the final image (I actually used these particular ones.) They also show another benefit of shooting in this manner: It was clear that Donneye was getting lost in the shadow of Steve Hove, so rather than wasting time on-set moving the lighting round, I could just ask Steve to move out of the frame for a couple of shots, in order to get a well lit version of Donneye.
My approach turned out to be especially useful when I found out shortly before the shoot that a member of the band wasn't going to be able to make it because his flight was cancelled due to the Icelandic volcano. What could have been a really big spanner in the works turned out to not be much of a big deal.
I just had to make a note of my camera height/angle, leave a little space in the image to fit someone else in later, make notes on the locations and power of my lighting, and take all the correct lens length/aperture/shutter speed info from the cameras raw files after the shoot. A bit geeky and bureaucratic, but necessary.
A few weeks after the shoot had wrapped, the missing band member came to the studio, I shot him on a white background with the right settings etc, all ready to comp him into the other images.
Next up, I'll try to show how I organise and put together my Photoshop files to make my images as flexible as possible, ready for any potential changes the client might make. This is the really sexy, glamorous part..... if you find Layer groups, adjustment layers, and background plates sexy and glamorous.
For part 2 of this blog post click here
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