17th March 2007 Bart & Dee Photoshoot (part 1)

 Bit of a delayed posting this one but better late than never.  I’ve decided to start adding images and a bit of background info for model shoots to this blog, flesh it out a bit when I’m not travelling.

 First a word on the models, what a pair!  Bart has been at me for quite some time now (he says about 2 years and I’m not arguing with him) for us to do a shoot together and I’d previously had a very successful shoot with Dee & we were both keen to work together again.  So when the two decided to do a shoot together in Brisbane it worked out great for all of us. 

 Bart actually drove up from Armidale to fit in with the weekend I had off from Aerial shooting (which has since turned into 5 weeks off, but that’s another story) which was a mighty effort and about ties for the most effort a model has gone to to work with me for a tfp shoot!  The other contender would be Jacinta who flew up from Melbourne, sure she had further to go but a flight is a lot less pain than an all day drive.  Anyways, not only did Bart drive up from Armidale but he organised a collection of literally hundreds of inspiration shots.  To Dee I gave the task of hunting down a gym for the second half of the shoot which she completed successfully.  So all in all I had bugger all preparation (besides mental) to do for this shoot, the models did the lot!! Wish that happened more often I can tell you…

 On the day I think it’s safe to say that the three of us worked our asses off.  From waking at 2:00am to make it down to Byron for a sunrise we shot through to about 11am and then made our way leisurely back up to Brisbane, we ended up shooting at the gym until around 3am the next morning, so it was a 24+hr day.  Mighty effort!!

 These first shots are just from the beach section of the shoot, and just the handful I’ve managed to edit up so far, there are still many other winners in there.  I started off with a very simple lighting setup of only my metz 60 ct4 on a tripod, using manual exposure settings to get that nice dark background.  For those wanting a bit more info on this basically I put the flash in place, took a test shot with the models in their rough positions and then adjusted the aperture until I had the models exposed correctly, then adjusted shutter speed until I had the background exposed how I wanted it.  These shots took only a fairly small amount of post processing because the contrast ratio was already about what I wanted by being able to balance the flash with the ambient light.

However my Metz soon failed, as I was to work out when I got it home the plug on the sync cord had become faulty so my camera wasn’t able to relay the order to the camera to flash.  So we then had to settle for an even simpler lighting setup - that would be my old friend simple natural light.  We were lucky in that it was a very cloudy morning so for the most part we had a huge softbox in the sky to work with.  These shots typically took a little more post work as instead of flash I had to use photoshop techniques (mainly dodge & burn) to bring out what I wanted to be brought out.

Without any further ado let me introduce the models:

Bart - http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=184064

Dee - http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=385512

And on to the photos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[tALSit]

These shots are amazing!
You have great style and technique. I also really appreciate the background information on the shoot.

[Noam Armonn]

great blog Ben.

You have a beautiful and unique microstock portfolio.
You can find me too in this market.
Thank you for sharing all this useful and interesting info.
How about a post about your editing workflow and PS techniques?

[Ben Heys]

Thanks guys for the kind words.

Noam,
At the moment I have an article on controlling noise and a three part general article on stock in my articles section. In time I'll be expanding this section with more articles on different aspects of photography, both behind the lens and behind the computer screen.

Cheers,
- Ben