Behind the Scenes – Before the Shoot

Do you know what happens when you put together two musicians and three photographers? Yeah, I don't either, but I'm pretty sure we came close on Monday night. Most behind the scenes blog posts will show you the final product first, but I want to reverse things a little bit. In this post, we'll look at the setup first for a quick and dirty musician photoshoot done in a basement parking garage.

More below the fold...

We had a simple concept, but with very little time to plan. While on the train home from work on Monday, my friend called and said he wanted to go out and shoot. He's a musician and plays at a local bar every now and then with Joash, a drummer. I stop by when I can to have a drink and listen to him play. His repertoire is mainly cover songs, but he's one of the best I know - yeah, I'm biased. Jason and Joash needed some photos to put on posters to hang around the bar. They've created a bit of a following, so why not try to improve upon that.

I can't speak from experience, but I'm pretty sure freelance musicians love to be also be paid. Again, that's just a guess. So, we headed to my old university. Close and convenient. At 9pm, shortly after exam time, no one would be there. We drove down to the bottom level of the parking garage, and saw this...

Perfect! Two "pay here" signs and two musicians. So we set up the equipment. Jason and Joash quickly put together a basic gig setup. Joash on the drums, Jason on the mandolin. Or at least I think that's what a mini guitar is called (hey, I'm a photographer, not a musician!).

Here's the full drum kit:

Then we moved onto the photography part. The lighting was pretty simple. Nikon SB-800 with an umbrella and on a stand, to camera left, slightly above Jason acted as the key. On the right, an SB-900 pointed towards the lovely white ceiling to fill in most of the other shadows. On camera, I had a second SB-900 inside an Orbis RingFlash. This filled in any other shadows created by the two off-axis lights to smooth out the lighting a bit. I also used the Orbis as the master through Nikon's CLS system, which became a bit of a problem later on because due to the more narrow field of light it threw (thus limiting the effective reach of CLS).

Here you can see the key, with the bounced fill just off camera right...

Another look from a wider point of view:

Once we'd had enough of the "pay here" signs, we moved everything a little bit to the left and shot against a whole bunch of empty space at a much higher shutter speed. Thankfully Nikon and CLS can still keep up with wireless high speed sync, so the end result was pretty cool...

I'll show you the end result in the next update, along with some modelling shots using the same space.